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Japan’s Environment Ministry mistakenly made publicly accessible an internal mailing list on international negotiations regarding a mercury trading regulation treaty, officials said on Wednesday.

The bureaucrats used the wrong privacy settings for Google Groups online discussions, making the internal memos available for anyone to see. The ministry’s officials did not know they had to change the service’s default setting, the officials said according to Kyodo news agency.

More than 6,000 cases of information obtained from public or private organisations, including hospital records, was publicly available, although it is not known yet whether anybody actually viewed them, the international press reports.

The ministry deleted on Tuesday night all of the 66 e-mails shared by the officials at the beginning of this year on U.S. search engine operator Google Inc.’s free mailing list.

“It was problematic that the processes around ongoing negotiations could be seen by outsiders. We have taken corrective steps,” an environment ministry spokesman said.

The documents were not “top secret”, but they were not for public release either, the spokesman said.

Google Groups allows users to establish or join discussions on any subject, which can be accessed either by email or through the web.

The user who sets up the group can determine who can join the group and who can view and post messages.

Anyone can see the messages thanks to the default on the set-up page, although this can be limited by a drop-down menu.