Google has detected a "privacy glitch" in its online Google Docs service, which exposed some private documents stored on online Google Docs service. The glitch caused inadvertent sharing of some word-processing and presentation documents stored on Google's online Docs service.

Google has confirmed the glitch in its online Google Docs service, and has stated that a small number of users were affected by the "privacy glitch" that has now been fixed.

According to Google, the Google Docs privacy problem was detected by engineers over the weekend, and the company notified about the bug initially in the official Docs Help forum. Just less than 0.05 percent of all documents within the system were affected by the bug; the affected documents were exposed on limited basis.

In a notification sent to the affected people, Google has said, "We've identified and fixed a bug which may have caused you to share some of your documents without your knowledge. This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets."

Google explained that the bug shared the documents only with the people, with whom Google have already shared documents. It did not share the documents with the world at large.

In explanation, Jennifer Mazzon, product manager of Google Docs has said, "The inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue affected so few users because it only could have occurred for a very small percentage of documents, and for those documents only when a specific sequence of user actions took place."

"We're sorry for the trouble this has caused. We understand our users' concerns -- in fact, we were affected by this bug ourselves -- and we're treating this very seriously," Mazzon has said.