© Reuters / Benoit Tessier
Google has admitted some users' private videos were sent to "unrelated users" who downloaded data through its Takeout service for a few days in November -
but wants you to pay the company to dig through your photos itself.
The search behemoth has quietly notified users of its Google Takeout service, which downloads a user's Google Data archive, that an unspecified number of their private videos ended up in random users' Takeout archives. The emails, sent a mere three months after the fact, are ominously vague, merely letting the user know that "one or more videos in your Google Photos account was affected" by the bug between November 21 and 25 of last year.
Nowhere are users told which videos, or in whose hands they ended up - a fact that will no doubt keep some users awake at night. The company did say that still photos were not affected in a statement to 9to5Google on Monday.
Google concluded its 'mea culpa' missive with the advice to "perform another export of your content and delete your prior export at this time" - you know, in case you have private videos from another "unrelated user" lurking in your archive.
The megacorporation's promise that "we fixed the underlying issue and have conducted an in-depth analysis to help prevent this from ever happening again" is cold comfort to users who still don't know exactly which of their videos were leaked, and Google's claim that "less than .01 percent of Photos users attempting takeouts were affected" is only likely to irritate anyone who receives the email - clearly, they were affected, and don't need to be reminded of how unlucky they were. Knowledge that Google is depending on the honor system to ensure "unrelated users" delete the videos they didn't ask to download is especially unlikely to reassure anyone receiving the message.
Comment: Jordan Peterson has said that some of the main motivating forces in the SJW movement are malevolence and envy. Both qualities are being displayed here in abundance.