Sharing documents with your co-workers via Google Docs is sure very convenient. But it can also be hazardous, points out Dr. David Gallagher in an essay titled ‘I’m in Your Google Docs, Reading Your Spreadsheets’ just published in the New York Times. The author notes:

Make one little typo and all your sensitive data could easily fall into the hands of - someone like me.

He narrates that a batch of invitations last spring to collaborate on certain Google Docs spreadsheets showed up in his Gmail account. These were regarding Web advertising. The author forgot about them until he signed up for Google Analytics recently.

Waiting for him there were Web traffic reports for 130 websites, most belonging to heartland newspapers including Community Newspaper Holdings (CNHI). On closer examination of the live spreadsheets and some online digging, he noted that a CNHI employee had most likely looked like sharing the reports as well as spreadsheets with an employee called Deirdre Gallagher. Instead, the person typed in the author’s Gmail address and handed him ‘the keys to a chunk of CNHI’s Web kingdom’, comprising the financial terms for many Web advertising deals.

The author concludes:

There was a time when a fair amount of criminal activity would have been required to access this much information about a firm’s internal workings and website performance. Now, someone can accidentally drop it into the lap of an outsider without even knowing it.