• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 9, 2009

An error in Google's online apps recently made some private documents public. The company said Monday it had sent some users of Document and Spreadsheets products a letter stating the error, and has since fixed the glitch.

The letter addressing the issue that Google calls an "isolated incident" states that company gurus had "identified and fixed a bug which may have caused you to share some of your documents without your knowledge."

Only .05% of all shared documents were affected, but the potential for serious damage appeared to be significant for businesses that rely on the suite of applications.

Google said the public sharing of private documents was limited to people with whom the user had previously collaborated or shared a document in the past. "Regrettably, a bug in Google Docs caused a small percentage of users to inadvertently share some documents," said a Google spokesperson. "The issue occurred if the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents or presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions."

The company said it took immediate action to fix the bug and apologized for the trouble the glitch may have caused. The bug did not affect spreadsheet documents.

As businesses and consumers move toward the concept of stand-alone and shared cloud applications, companies offering the products need to do more to protect privacy and data security, said Alex Yoder, CEO of WebTrends, an online business analytics application company.

"Google is a unique company because they provide consumer-based products and solutions on the Internet that individual consumers consume as well as share," he said. "At the same time they collect anonymous visitor information based on activities."