Yesterday we contacted some of our users to let them know about an issue that affected their Google Docs accounts. We believe the issue affected less than 0.05% of all documents, but, in the interest of transparency, we wanted to share the details more broadly.
As we noted in the Google Docs Help Forum yesterday, we've identified and fixed a bug where a very small percentage of users shared some of their documents inadvertently. The inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue affected so few users because it only could have occurred for a very small percentage of documents, and for those documents only when a specific sequence of user actions took place.
For this small percentage of documents, the bug (now fixed) occurred when the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and then changed the sharing permissions. The bug did not affect spreadsheets.
As part of the fix, we used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as having been affected. We then emailed the document owners to point them to their affected documents in case they need to re-share them.
We're sorry for the trouble this has caused. We understand our users' concerns (in fact, we were affected by this bug ourselves) and we're treating this very seriously. We hope this explanation provides greater clarity.
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