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Googling

Looking for something on your home computer network? Google announces a feature of its new Desktop 3 software that allows you to search all your computers for documents, spreadsheets, web histories, etc...

And the Electronic Frontier Foundation is urging you not to do it.

The feature copies all such files from your hard drives to Google's servers, and while the data is password protected, EFF is concerned that this makes people's information more valuable to government agencies, people suing you and hackers who've pinched your password.

"Coming on the heels of serious consumer concern about government snooping into Google's search logs, it's shocking that Google expects its users to now trust it with the contents of their personal computers," said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "Unless you configure Google Desktop very carefully, and few people will, Google will have copies of your tax returns, love letters, business records, financial and medical files, and whatever other text-based documents the Desktop software can index. The government could then demand these personal files with only a subpoena rather than the search warrant it would need to seize the same things from your home or business, and in many cases you wouldn't even be notified in time to challenge it. Other litigants—your spouse, your business partners or rivals, whoever—could also try to cut out the middleman (you) and subpoena Google for your files."

Google says the information stays on its servers for 30 days, the BBC reports. Google plans to encript all data. An obvious benefit is that you could call up work documents from home and visa versa.

"We think this will be a very useful tool, but you will have to give up some of your privacy," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience. For many of us, that trade off will make a lot of sense."

The paradox here is that Google gets hit for exposing users to outside intrusion at a time when the company is fighting the U.S. government's efforts to make it turn over its search records. As Red Herring notes:

Google cited its privacy policy in its refusal to hand over 1 million random web addresses and records of all Google searches for a one-week period. While Google refused to comply with the request last August, Microsoft, Yahoo and America Online have admitted that they provided search data to the government.

Jason
Posted 02/10/2006 09:55:39 AM
As much as I like google's web products, I've never used any of their desktop products, save for trying Google Earth once.

That gives you an idea of Google's storage capacity.  I thought giving people 2.7 GB (and rising) of gmail space might push their limits, but this is absurd!  I have nearly a terabyte of diskspace at home on my network, but it's not all visible from any computer (for security reasons) so it wouldn't all get uploaded.  I'm guessing they have some major compression going on as well.
Jason
Posted 02/10/2006 10:05:47 AM
[Further investigation]:  The reason they give is that they want to be able to search a file even if one of your computers is off-line

Explanation

A cool thing about it is it seems that you can run Desktop at home and at work, and find files on either of those computers, as it appears that they only prereqs for getting this to work are:

"... you will need a Google Account (the same login you use for Gmail, Orkut, or other Google services).  ...you must also install Google Desktop on them as well as enable the Search Across Computers preference using the same Google Account on each one."

It really doesn't say, but it might be a "secret" feature.  If someone wants to try it out... by all means :)