ISSUE 71 • ANDROID ADVISOR 9that their videos might have accidentally ended up in
someone else’s hands.
Before you freak out, let us explain. According to
a tweet from Jon Oberheide, who was a victim of the
breach, it took place between 21 and 25 November
2019, and involved Google Takeout, which lets you
export a copy of content in your Google Account
to back it up or use it with a third-party service. It’s
not clear exactly what went wrong, but Google says:
“Some videos in Google Photos were incorrectly
exported to unrelated users’ archives.” Photos were,
however, not affected.
The search giant says the underlying issue has
been identified and resolved, so it appears to be
related to a bug, not any malicious activity. Emails
are being sent to people who were affected by the
issue, so if you don’t get one, your videos are safe.
While no one wants their personal videos sent to
strangers, this breach isn’t nearly as bad as it could be.
For one, it only lasted five days, and it was specifically
related to the export of data using Google Takeout,
which most people probably don’t even know about.
So that’s an extremely small percentage of users.
Granted, it would have been nice if Google alerted
users when it happened, rather than two and a half
months later – and if you’re one of the affected
users, you aren’t going to care about statistics – but
you probably shouldn’t freak out and pull all of your
photos off of the service. It’s not a bad idea to take
this opportunity to prune your library of any highly
sensitive photos or videos, though.