In a serious privacy lapse, Google is notifying users that videos stored in their Google Photos account were mistakenly shared with other unrelated users.

Yesterday, Google began sending email notifications to users explaining that a bug caused their videos to be included in other user's data when it downloaded via the Google Takeout service.

This notification tells affected users that between November 21st, 2019, and November 25th, 2019, "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."

Google Takeout Notification

Source: Jon Oberheide

The Google Takeout service allows users to download content that has been uploaded to various services operated by Google.

This includes the content and data that has been uploaded to Google Photos, YouTube, Chrome, and many other services.

When users downloaded their data using Google Takeout, this bug would have caused other people's videos to also be included in their Google Photos data archive.

For those who received another user's private video, Google recommends that you just delete it.

"The underlying issues has been identified and resolved. We recommend you perform another export of your content and delete your prior export at this time," the Google notification stated.

As you can imagine, for those who are affected, this is a serious privacy lapse as users expect their photos and videos to remain private and not be shared with any others.

This bug also illustrates the inherent risks of storing your data in the cloud.

Unless you can encrypt your cloud data using a passphrase you supply and that only you know, bugs like this or inappropriate access by cloud storage employees could lead to your private information, photos, and videos being exposed.