Recover Lost Documents

After a mishap in which 0.05 percent of documents stored on the Google Docs site were inadvertently shared, privacy advocates have begun turning to the Federal Trade Commission to shut down all of Google’s online services until government-approved safeguards have been firmly laid out.

Paul Lilly stated in his article for Maximum PC that Marc Rotenberg, a lawyer and adjunct law professor, compared the situation to an unsafe child safety seat. Rotenberg summarized in a telephone interview to CNET that if a child seat could not be securely attached to a car passenger seat, then the FTC would vehemently tell the company who manufactured it to fix the problem. Rotenberg stated that consumers are at risk when a product or service is released for users to utilize and yet it is far from secure.

The Google Docs incident in question occurred in early March of this year, in which Google claimed that a bug caused an isolated incident in which a minute fraction of users of its Google Docs service had their word-processing and presentation documents shared.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center submitted a letter to the FTC asking that all of Google’s cloud-computing services be halted, including their e-mail service, Gmail. In addition to shutting everything down, EPIC also wants Google to pay a “public fund” to benefit advocacy groups of $5 million.