Google Desktop Search

As you probably remember, I told you in my presentation that "Google Desktop Search" (GDS) is one of the products Google developed and launched in 2004. GDS is a program that indexes your entire hard drive in the same way Google indexes the Web. One negative side effect is that information about your computer and your programs including private information are more accessible. To give you an idea what this means in reality, I found an article by Tom Spring, here again, I provided the first paragraphs if you want to read the rest, klick on the link!


Google Desktop Search: Security Threat?
Posted by Tom Spring
Friday, October 15, 2004, 06:29 AM (PST)

Google Desktop Search might just be too good. Using the new software, I was able to bypass user names and passwords that secure Web-based e-mail programs and view personal messages sent and received on public PCs.
Using Google's new software on a shared computer at the Google booth at the Digital Life trade show floor I was able to easily search for, find, and read private Yahoo e-mail sent on the computer by previous users earlier in the day.
Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products, told me she wasn't surprised. "This is not a bug, rather a feature," she says. Google always intended people to be able to index and search Web-based e-mail viewed and composed on PC, she says. Google Desktop Search is not intended to be used on computers that are shared with more than one person, she says.
Whether or not Google intended this, I take great pause at knowing any e-mail I write or read on a PC with Google Desktop Search could be called up and read by a complete stranger. (...)


Wanna know more?

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/000264.html