Google Takeout unintentionally exported videos from Google Photos to random users’ archives

Google Takeout, a Google service created by the Google Data Liberation Front, gives Google account holders the ability to export and download all their data. However, the availability of Google data was a little too liberal for a few days in November. Google recently notified Takeout users that an unfortunate technical issue affected the service between the 21st and 25th of November:

Unfortunately, during this time, some videos in Google Photos were incorrectly exported to unrelated users' archives.

The Google Photos archives downloaded during the affected period have a chance of being incomplete or containing other users' videos. According to 9to5Google, this issue affected less than 0.01% of users who downloaded Photos archives. The Verge pointed out that Google Photos has over a billion users, but how many people downloaded archives from Takeout during the five day period is unknown. Google's notice states the following:

The underlying issue has been identified and resolved. We recommend you perform another export of your content and delete your prior export at this time.

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