Google divulged recently that it shared with unauthorized users a small number of online documents. The privacy snafu, initiated by a software bug, impacted a minuscule proportion of documents according to a blog post by Jennifer Mazzon, Google Docs product manager. Google alerted the users who were affected and reversed the mistake, she stated.

The bug affected users who altered their sharing settings on numerous documents and presentations simultaneously, resulting in Google sharing those documents with other users with whom the document owner had shared a document in the past. Though remedied, the mistake punctuates another risk in online software: the possibility that someone may acquire unplanned access to it.