Google Copies Your Hard Drive

Filed in archive on February 10, 2006

EFF: Google today announced a new "feature" of its Google Desktop software that greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. If a consumer chooses to use it, the new "Search Across Computers" feature will store copies of the user's Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google's own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user's computers. EFF urges consumers not to use this feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who've obtained a user's Google password.

http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_02.php

Randy: Google had to know this was coming. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! First thing, if you are an enterprise IT manager, then you should be blocking this feature at the firewall. Just imagine all the mundane users that are gonna install this at work and have all the company's private documents uploaded to Google's server.

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