Someone else may have your videos, Google tells users

As the well-worn internet saying goes – there is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer.

This week, an unknown number of Google Photos users were alarmed to find that this can turn out to be true in surprisingly personal ways.

According to an email sent to affected users, between 21 and 25 November 2019 anyone using the Google ‘Download your data’ service might have experienced a serious glitch:

Unfortunately, during this time, some videos in Google Photos were incorrectly exported to unrelated users’ archives. One or more videos in your Google Photos account was affected by this issue.

Conversely, being a two-way issue, affected users might notice any videos in their archive not belonging to them.

The service is part of Google Takeout (or Google Takeaway) and can be used to download copies of a wide range of data relating to Google services, including photos and videos.

Google doesn’t state how many users this relates to but it’s safe to assume that if you used the function between those dates, you are probably affected.

One Google user who did was Duo Security co-founder and CEO, Jon Oberheide, who tweeted the news to the world after receiving the email this week:

@googlephotos To be clear, this is a big screw-up. I hope the number of affected parties is small, but the impact t… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

—
Jon Oberheide (@jonoberheide) February 04, 2020

After contacting Google for clarification, he was told that “unfortunately, we’re not able to provide a full list of impacted videos.”

Because the videos are now stored on other people’s computers, there is no obvious way of getting them back.

Google says it has now fixed whatever problem led to the issue and advises affected users to perform another data export of the same data while deleting any already downloaded. Re-downloading the data should overwrite any content as long as that archive itself hasn’t been backed up elsewhere.

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