Tech

Users complain about the appearance of random events in Google Calendar

A significant number of users are complaining about a bug in Google Calendarthe well-known calendar service from the search engine giant, which is causing the appearance or creation of random events leading to unrelated Gmail messages.

Users affected by the bug saw that Google Calendar had been showing events all day yesterday that were randomly created based on some Gmail messages that didn’t necessarily have to be related to any specific event. This circumstance makes the error detected in the calendar service all the more mysterious because, at least in appearance and from the point of view of the end user, there is no clear pattern.

Among the events they have seen affected users, there is an all-day one titled “United States Financial Privacy Notice” (US Financial Privacy Notice), which also appeared as a reminder notification on many Android smartphones. The newsletter they also seem to be triggering those random and erroneous events (at least from the end user’s point of view).

Disable Gmail events in Google Calendar for Android

The origin of the error in Google Calendar is not clear, but the solution is apparently simple, since it consists of going to Settings > Gmail Events in the Android app to then disable the “Show Gmail Events” option. After that, affected users should no longer see these strange random events, although if you see that everything is in order and the feature is useful to you, there would be no reason to disable it.

We’ll see if Google publishes any explanation related to this incident, which surely will have upset more than one. Seeing what has happened recently with LastPass, which has acknowledged that the attack it received in August was much worse than expected, let’s hope this was an internal failure and not something caused by an external attacker, because otherwise the snowball could grow even causing catastrophic consequences, especially if we see that Gmail is a service that has hundreds of millions or billions of users with billions of active accounts in total.

We strongly recommend carefully reviewing current, past, and future Google Calendar events to make sure everything is in order and reporting to the company if you detect the error.

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