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Oh no Google

Google may have 'incorrectly' exported some of your videos in Google Photos to strangers

Google says it conducted an in-depth analysis after resolving the issue to prevent it from happening again in the future.
Babu Mohan
4 Feb 2020

Google Photos logo on a OnePlus 6Source: Joe Maring / Android Central

What you need to know

  • A technical issue affected Google Photos' 'Download your data' service between November 21, 2019 and November 25, 2019.
  • During the affected period, Google says some Google Photos content may have been incorrectly exported to unrelated users' archives.
  • Google says the issue was identified and resolved on November 25, 2019.

Google today started alerting users about a "technical issue" that may have caused some of their videos in Google Photos to be sent to other users'' archives.

Google says the "technical issue" affected the 'Takeout' service for Google Photos between November 21 and November 25 last year. Between November 21 and November 25, the company says Google Photos content of users who requested performed an export may have been incorrectly sent to some other users' archives.

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

— Jon Oberheide (@jonoberheide) February 4, 2020

Those of you who downloaded your Google Photos data during the affected period may find that it is incomplete and contains videos that belong to someone else. Google says the underlying issue was identified and resolved on November 25, 2019, and that no other service was affected by it. The search giant also claims that less than 0.01% of Google Photos users who used Google Takeout to export their content during the affected period were actually affected.

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In case you had performed an export of your Google Photos content between November 21 and November 25 last year, it is highly recommended that you perform another export and delete your previous export.

Google provided the following comment to 9to5Google regarding the technical issue:

We are notifying people about a bug that may have affected users who used Google Takeout to export their Google Photos content between November 21 and November 25. These users may have received either an incomplete archive, or videos—not photos—that were not theirs. We fixed the underlying issue and have conducted an in-depth analysis to help prevent this from ever happening again. We are very sorry this happened.

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