Could you imagine if your email suddenly became accessible to the world?  What if your “My Documents” was accessible to people around the world without your permission.  One thing is for sure, if Microsoft messed this up, there would be a revolt and everyone would lose their minds.  In what is a massive beach of privacy, Google Docs and Spreadsheet has now been apparently sharing some user’s documents with people that were never granted access.  At first I thought for sure the article that Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch published was a mistake, but Google has confirmed the incident by sending emails out to affected users.

Google email servers have gone down numerous times this year.  Now they seem to have issues with files that are private being shared out to people.  I realize that all these services are “free”, at least they are marketed as such, but they really aren’t.  The cost is privacy, poor security, and downtime.  Amazon has had its fair share of issues this year as well, taking down hundreds of thousands of sites and applications that used their cloud platform in the process. 

While I fully believe cloud computing is the future, I also strongly believe that not everything should be “in the cloud”.  There are certain things that belong in my home, in the safety of my own computer, and there are things that belong in the cloud.  When Ray Ozzie of Microsoft announced their cloud computing vision, I was relieved that finally a company had it right. 

I’ve been using “cloud computing” for a while now, even with my office documents and some personal files.  It’s pretty easy!  I just load up word, I save to Office Live Workspace, and that’s it.  Here is a screenshot from my computer at home, saving a file to the cloud.  So simple.

In the next few months, we should see Azure hit center stage as Microsoft begins to rollout its full plan for the platform.  It will allow software developers and companies to create applications “In The Cloud” without having to worry about things like disk space, availability, and hardware security.  Azure will take advantage of all the things Microsoft has learned over nearly 30 years.  Visual Studio Developers will easily be able to start creating applications within minutes.  Organizations that have invested in highly skilled software engineers that create these applications will be able to start building applications in the cloud easily.

Personally when it comes time for our company to choose our cloud computing strategy, I know exactly which company I am going to trust to be there for us when we need them.  It has nothing to do with my own “biased’” opinion.  It has everything to do with the track record of companies that are trying to offer cloud computing platforms today.  From my perspective, and hopefully from all of yours, they just don’t cut it.

Here is the email that Google just sent out to its users.  Imagine if Microsoft sent something like this out.  Would you accept it?  Why accept it when it’s Google?

Dear Google Docs user,

We wanted to let you know about a recent issue with your Google Docs account. We’ve identified and fixed a bug which may have caused you to share some of your documents without your knowledge. This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets.

To help remedy this issue, we have used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as being affected. Since the impacted documents are now accessible only to you, you will need to re-share the documents manually. For your reference, we’ve listed below the documents identified as being affected.

We apologize for the inconvenience that this issue may have caused. We want to assure you that we are treating this issue with the highest priority.

The Google Docs Team