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Analytics pic by cambodia4kids

Many of us web workers use Google Docs and share spreadsheets and other sensitive information with our coworkers.

And it could be DANG-JER-US! (sic!)

Now, I’m not telling you to stop - although I did say that in the headline for the post (hey, how else could I get you to read this post?)

All I am saying, is slow it down a little bit and take a second look at who you are sharing your information with.

Here’s why:

Many of us are in the news business or at least the web publishing industry. We all know how easy it is to publish typos. It happens all the time.

And typos also occur when sharing documents or accounts with the email addresses of our friends and coworkers.

Type a wrong key, and you could be sharing your Google Analytics data or sales spreadsheets with a potential competitor.

The New York Times David Gallagher reports on a Google sharing situation gone wrong.

Last spring a batch of invitations to collaborate on some Google Docs spreadsheets showed up in my Gmail account. The spreadsheets had something to do with Web advertising. I forgot about them until I signed up recently for Google Analytics, a free service that lets Web-site owners track visitors and monitor traffic trends.

Waiting for me there were live Web traffic reports for a whopping 130 sites, most of them belonging to heartland newspapers like The Muskogee (Oklahoma) Phoenix, The Oskaloosa (Iowa) Herald and The Shelbyville (Illinois) Daily Union. All of these are part of Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. (CNHI), a company based in Birmingham, Ala., that owns more than 90 daily papers around the country.

Making a mistake like sharing documents with the wrong email address can happen to the best of us. I get emails for people from other companies all the time. Really.

Another problem is that Google Docs could be published to the public by accident.

Just to be clear, Google Docs and tools are incredibly useful and powerful. I’d recommend any of you using them. I love ‘em!

But when it comes to sharing your Google data, just take a pause and recheck who you are sharing the data with. This amazingly useful function could easily become a nightmare.

Has this issue ever happened to you?