Google admits glitch sent people’s videos to strangers

SAN FRANCISCO: Google said that a software glitch resulted in some Photo app smartphone videos being given to the wrong people.

Google is notifying those who may have been affected. “We are very sorry this happened. We fixed the underlying issue and have conducted an in-depth analysis to help prevent this from ever happening again,” the company said.

It is estimated that a small fraction of those who used the ‘Takeout’ tool may have encountered the glitch, which affected people who used the app to export stored videos from Google Photos between November 21 and November 25 last year.

“These users may have received either an incomplete archive or videos — not photos — that were not theirs,” Google said.

Google Takeout is a tool intended to make it simple for people to download copies of their data from cloud-hosted services such as email or storage of photos and videos.

Takeout was intended to provide people with an easy way to liberate their personal data from online services. In this case, however, the bug delivered videos to the wrong people.