Google accidentally exposes private documents

Google has confirmed that they made a mistake that made some documents that were supposed to be private, shared. How many documents were affected ? Obviously I don’t know, but we might get a better idea if we look at some Google Docs usage statistics.

In September 2008, Compete says that 4.4 million unique users visited Google Docs in September — that’s only one month worth of traffic. For argument sake, let’s say Compete is correct, and each of those people have created only one document in Google docs in their life.

The official response from Google states that 0.05% of all documents were affected — that would actually mean somewhere around 220,000 if my low-ball estimate is close.