Google has confirmed that a TechCrunch tipster was telling the truth: an error indeed caused some users' text documents and presentations to be unintentionally shared with others.

According to Google's statement, the glitch affected "less than .05% of documents" and only shared files to people with whom a user (or one of their collaborators) had previously shared another document.

Somehow, that's not very comforting.

Regardless of the number of users affected or how isolated an incident this was, it raises some serious concerns. Even if none of your documents were involved, they could have been. Accidentally violating privacy and exposing data (whether it's confidential or not) is a massive problem, and one that just shouldn't happen. Period.

None of my Google Docs contain any sensitive details. They don't contain any useful information about anything, for that matter. That doesn't mean I'm not concerned about who sees them and who doesn't. They're my documents, and I certainly don't want collaborators being accidentally given permission to access them.

For a while I've been pondering finally moving my documents from my desktop to my Google Docs, but that's a move that I'll be putting on hold for the time being.