Sunday, February 12, 2006

Don't turn on every Google Desktop Search option!

Google have announced a new version of their Desktop Search program. One of the new features is called "Search Across Computers". You can read about it on the Google site.
"Search Across Computers enables you to search your documents and viewed web pages across all your computers. " To make this function work the searchable files get uploaded to Google's servers. For this feature to operate you need to use your Google account, the same one that you use for Gmail and the other Google services. This means that if an attacker can obtain your Google login details, he will be able to access your confidential files. The good side is that this feature is an option and is not turned on by default. I advise you to keep it that way. And I'm even not speaking about the privacy issue... as everything will be stored on Google servers ... if you enable this.