Google Apps: The Latest Glitch--Marking Private Documents Public

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It recently came to light that a small percentage of the documents stored in Google Apps were available when they should have been locked down. Apparently, if a document owner or collaborator with sharing rights had previously shared a document and then altered its sharing rights by altering the sharing rights of multiple documents at once, then those documents were still accessible. This issue applied to word processing documents and presentations; it did not affect spreadsheets. Google discussed this issue in the Docs Help forum; other stories are here: CNet, PCWorld, TechCrunch).

Google, of course, is soft-pedaling the issue, estimating that it affected less that 0.05% of the documents stored in Google Apps. However, if you do the math, the number of affected documents runs into the hundreds of thousands. As of September 2008, Google was saying 500,000 companies were using Google Apps, with 3,000 companies signing up per day. That comes out to roughly 800,000 companies now (500,000 + 300,000 [3,000 x 20 business days in a month, times five months (October-February)]. Assuming each company has 50 documents stored (a conservative number), that comes out to 40 million documents. 0.05% of that number is 200,000 documents: not a small number. In addition, I would argue the scenario Google describes is the one you would take with laid off employees--as employees, they would have had access to the documents; after you laid them off, you would have stopped their access to the whole set of documents in a library. So while the percentage of affected documents is low, the scenario is one that could do you damage.

This is not to say the same problem doesn't happen with software-based systems: companies forget to remove logins for laid-off employees and former partners; employees load up their portable USB keys with confidential documents all the time. But it does show that SaaS-based solutions are not heralding in a new era of pristine perfection, as the feel-good presentations from companies like Google and Salesforce.com often imply. Once again, enterprises pondering a move to the cloud need to think through the perils of entrusting their information to a third party.

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