Month: February 2020

Enlarge / The lobby of Google's new campus and office in Singapore. (credit: Getty Images)

When it comes to dealing with shareholders, has Google’s parent, Alphabet, turned over a new leaf?

The decision of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to step away from day-to-day involvement in the tech-holding company last month stirred hopes on Wall Street that Alphabet would take on more of the trappings of a conventional company when it comes to dealing with shareholders.

So it was notable that, with his first quarterly earnings report on Monday, new boss Sundar Pichai gave Wall Street something it had long wanted: a look under the covers, with a new level of disclosure about the group’s YouTube and cloud computing divisions.

Enlarge / The lobby of Google's new campus and office in Singapore. (credit: Getty Images)

When it comes to dealing with shareholders, has Google’s parent, Alphabet, turned over a new leaf?

The decision of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to step away from day-to-day involvement in the tech-holding company last month stirred hopes on Wall Street that Alphabet would take on more of the trappings of a conventional company when it comes to dealing with shareholders.

So it was notable that, with his first quarterly earnings report on Monday, new boss Sundar Pichai gave Wall Street something it had long wanted: a look under the covers, with a new level of disclosure about the group’s YouTube and cloud computing divisions.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor)

Google has disclosed a nightmare of a security and privacy bug affecting Google Photos users: for a time, it was possible for private videos to be downloaded by unrelated users. The bug happened through Google Takeout, a service that lets you download archives of your Google Data. Apparently, the wrong videos were included in these user-generated archives, resulting in the users getting local copies of somebody else's videos.

Google has been sending emails to affected Takeout users. In the email, which was first spotted by 9to5Google, Google writes, "Some videos in Google Photos were incorrectly exported to unrelated user's archives. One or more videos in your Google Photos account was affected by this issue. If you downloaded your data, it may be incomplete, and it may contain videos that are not yours." Google writes that the bug happened "between November 21, 2019 and November 25, 2019."

Whoa, what? @googlephotos? pic.twitter.com/2cZsABz1xb

— Jon Oberheide (@jonoberheide) February 4, 2020

While this message is directed to Google Takeout users who tried to download their own data and accidentally got someone else's, we've yet to see a message directed to the "unrelated users" whose videos ended up in the archive. We've asked Google if it plans to notify users who have had their private videos exposed, and we'll update this article if the company responds.