Did I Accidently Hack Google?

So I was recently helping a friend design a Google Sites homepage for his church.

For the ‘Contact Us’ page I went into google docs and copied a template of the “Spreadsheet Form” (its a google gadget thing that lets you put a contact form on your website and have the results go directly into a Google Docs hosted spreadsheet.

Everything worked perfectly…however I noticed all of a sudden in my google docs account I had access to the contact spreadsheets for a few other churches with similar names.

I do not understand why google suddenly placed this document in my list of accessible files. The only reason I can think of is that the file has an extremely similar name to the file that I made for my friend’s church. It looks like they used improper sharing permission settings and made the file public, but that still doesn’t explain how it ended up in my list of files.

Click here for an example of one of the files that appeared out of the blue.

Here is an example of a legit entry in it, I think there are lots of spam entries too.

"This is Bro. Blanton your missionary to South Africa. I need to cancel our meeting of the 11th of August. Judy will be having a mastectomy that week so we will not be able to be with you.

Jeff Blanton
South Africa

Why do I see these files?

Are you sure they wanted them private? Is there anything in them that wouldn’t be safe enough through obscurity?

And, yes, Google Docs has a lot of problems. They seem to be constantly tweaking it, but not incubating it and beta testing it before releasing it. I currently will not use their PDF reader since it fails half the time.

I could see this happening either as a direct result of something going wrong, or becuase of an overenthusiastic fix.

How similar are these file names? And are their document IDs (The number in the URL) similar as well?

What! Judy Blanton’s having a mastectomy?