Google leak will dent faith in the cloud

A glitch saw a small number of private Google Docs files stored on the net made public – and could put a big dent in people’s confidence in cloud computing.

US PC World reports that a Google error over the weekend that exposed 0.5% of private Google Docs files exposed to public scrutiny.

Google says if you were affected, you would have been notified by email, and that the hole has now been patched.

Google Docs product manager Jennifer Mazzon says, "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."

Regardless, it’s going to make consumers think twice about using Google's various online Apps, which let you use a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation programme and other software - and files created by that software - that’s stored online rather than your PC.

Already, I’ve found chief information officers at large New Zealand companies wary of any software that stores information out on the internet (or “in the cloud” as the latest buzzspeak goes) rather than the safe confines of their own companies' networks.

Their reservations centred on fears of “user error” –such as Mr Computer Illiterate manager ticking the wrong box and inadvertently sharing his Google Calendar with the world – rather than Google being hacked, or as was the case over the weekend, spilling data by mistake. But this won’t help.

Others have found legal reasons for giving an all-Google Apps solution a swerve, such as the University of Auckland as it battens down for the Public Records Act coming into force next year.

Google’s privacy glitch is poorly-timed, too, coming on the back of a multi-hour Gmail outage that saw users of the $US50/year Premier version of Apps (including yours truly) receive a 15-day credit.

But, guess what? I’m sticking with Google Docs. A few glitches - heck, usually more glitches than this - happen with all systems (and user-error – if I had a dollar for every time somebody sent me a Microsoft Word document with revision-tracking left on ...).

But, for now, I’ll also be keeping my most secure documents on own PC, and on Microsoft Office.

Microsoft says its coming cloud computing version of Windows will let companies calibrate how much data they store out on the net, and how much within their own walls. We'll see how that goes.