San Francisco - 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.
"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. "If you use the Search Across Computers feature and don't configure Google Desktop very carefully—and most people won't—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."
The privacy problem arises because the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986, or ECPA, gives only limited privacy protection to emails and other files that are stored with online service providers—much less privacy than the legal protections for the same information when it's on your computer at home. And even that lower level of legal protection could disappear if Google uses your data for marketing purposes. Google says it is not yet scanning the files it copies from your hard drive in order to serve targeted advertising, but it hasn't ruled out the possibility, and Google's current privacy policy appears to allow it.
"This Google product highlights a key privacy problem in the digital age," said Cindy Cohn, EFF's Legal Director. "Many Internet innovations involve storing personal files on a service provider's computer, but under outdated laws, consumers who want to use these new technologies have to surrender their privacy rights. If Google wants consumers to trust it to store copies of personal computer files, emails, search histories and chat logs, and still 'not be evil,' it should stand with EFF and demand that Congress update the privacy laws to better reflect life in the wired world."
I can't belive that i'm not going to use google desktop any more
You didn't mention the source of your article. Besides posts like this - where the whole of it is quoted content from another site with just one line of feedback from you - are not really what we're looking for. Before you make further posts, make sure you read the following rules.
You lost 10 credits for this post. Since you're new here, just a verbal warning will do.
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Somehow I'm not too worried. I just won't use that one "plug-in" for a lack of a better word with google. I think it was a good idea though. I mean its only work documents and things like that type. Anyone who is dumb enough to upload passwords and other type of information deserves to have them hacked.
Hmm i never used google desktop anyways, as it kept saying it conflicted with my antivirus (NOD32). That is not the first time they have breached privacy though...
Google had just published another new service, it is called google web accelerator, it's an
accelerator for your web surfing, so you can save time surfing the internet, it looks a very great
service when you look at it generally, but for the first time google made a very bad service, it
does nothing new than the old accelerators, to make it appears like a very good brand service they
put a warning that this service is only for broadband ADSL internet connections, not for dialup
internet connections, as they didn't test it for dialup, in fact i did, i tested it...
One of the most popular Google programs, and maybe one of the most dangerous, Google Earth, is
getting a new version. What's more, this time it is released for all supported operating system
simultaneously. You can download it here . Besides various OS support, it is also multilingual
with French, German, Spanish and Italian now supported. Also, these countries are now more detailed
in Google Earth and advanced search is now available. Next, Google has increased the percentage of
the land covered with high resolution images. It is now 20%, whereas the other 80% ...
Just kidding, they do have money /smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0"
alt="smile.gif" /> But someone could that they don't. Here's why. The incident happened in
Brazil. The Google owners were having some business meeting with the local Google group, but they
were also relaxing on the sandy beaches. But something went wrong when they went to a restaurant.
The restaurant was for rather rich people, since it was quite expensive. After finishing the dinner,
the Google owners wanted to pay, but their credit cars got rejected! /biggrin.gi...
After a LONG wait, Google finally has managed to round-up it's online office suite by adding in
a basic Presentation creator. However, contrary to all earlier speculations - they haven't named
it Presently . Rather this new app doesn't have any distinct name at all other than being
refered to as Google Presentation. Features Microsoft PowerPoint files less than 10 MB can be
imported and exports take the shape of HTML files with images. Themes and layouts of slides can be
modified - but there aren't too many available options. As it is with Google D...
Just when you thought that Google is running out of ideas for their products, something unexpected
was introduced - a new search engine! I am sure everyone is confused - why would Google make such a
move when they already have the most popular search engine in the world (Yahoo! fans, face the
truth)? The answer is actually quite simple - but this is just my opinion - innovation. Even though
it is so widely used, we must admin that Google's search engine is a bit old-fashioned.
Unfortunately, they can't just upgrade it all of a sudden, as I am sure it would annoy...
Newspaper bloopers can be real funny, but I haven't seen one of the likes of this in ages...
The Nation , one of leading English dailies of Thailand reported today that ... Google Sky
launches Bobby Johnson, technology correspondent. Apparently, The Nation was supposed to run
this syndicated story on the launch of Google Sky, written by Bobby Johnson. Seems like they were
mighty impressed with Johnson and decided to launch him instead /biggrin.gif"
style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="biggrin.gif" /> Here's a screenshot...
Inci...
Im not too sure if this can be posted here, but its news to me! anyway, If you go to google maps and
search for directions from New York to Paris, you get a rather interesting route. Go to the link
below and look at step 23 of the route! New York, New York to Paris,France made me laugh! -jimmy...
QUOTE Ventures into online machine based translations haven't met with much success so far -
at least not to a degree that can be called phenomenal. While smaller words / phrases / sentences
translate fine, the translator engines perform rather pathetically when it comes to large chunks of
text. Translation engines have been around since the early 90's, when AltaVista came out with
its famous Babelfish . In general, the online translators are pretty good and are able to convey
the essence of the translated text. However, translator engines fair miserably ...
I don't know if this News has already come up on this forum...
http://www.informationweek.com/management/...cleID=196701966 Having a search engine where "the
people" contribute, is definitely a good idea. No doubt Wikipedia has changed the way people access
information. Will this Wikiasari be able to change the way people search? ...
Some of you like myself swear by google, since we cannot imagine living without google search.
However some of the discussions on net has made me thinking over an important issue. Will Google
control too much of our lives ? here are the links which discusses an important point on
google's future plans ... Google wants to be YOUR Internet. Google becomes domain name
seller A Google OS by 2010 Google's Sinister(?) Plans GoogleOS Scenarios Let me
add, google has already hired top brains for its (secret project), headed by Robert Pike. It coul...
Guys... you HAVE to try this service and see for youself. It's simply terrific. I'll quote
my review on it from ChaosLab . QUOTE(Chaos Laboratory) How would you like to be able to
create new events in your Google Calendar , write new posts on your blog hosted on Blogger ,
Typepad or Wordpress or create reminders , to-do's and notes without ever firing up
your browser? That too all this through the familiar environment of you favourite Instant
Messenger, be it Yahoo! , GTalk or MSN ? Look no further cause Imified has bro...
Google's at it again and this time with a much-needed patent search engine. It sports the same
minimalistic interface that's a trademark of Google and allows you to perform fulltext searches
on a database of over 7 million patents and view the details of each patent along with all the
drawings / sketches. The scanned pages of the original patents are displayed in a PDF-like format
with the ability to zoom in/out Apparently it uses the same underlying technology as Google Book
Search. For those who've cracked their skulls over the notorious USPTO search...
Well, well, well. It looks like Yahoo and IBM want a piece out the Google search empire. The two
are reportly teaming up in a joint venture to offer a free data search tool that will be geared
towards businesses that offer better Yahoo search results. The search product should be a huuuge
success since IBM already sells a business focused search product called OmniFind that allows
businesses to search through internal documents. You couple this with the Yahoo search platform and
wallah! Better search results! Check out the link below to read the article. Its really ...
FINALLY! Finally Google released Google Earth for Linux. Now, we don't need to run it over WINE.
Google Earth uses QT and OpenGL as renderers, so you do need those driver and toolkit.
http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html It is currently in beta as part of the 4th version.
xboxrulz...
Try this link for a satellite view of the World Trade Center site, with map superimposed, for
example: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=34.036764,-...9&z=1&t=h&hl=en I tried to locate "high
knob, virginia" and bizarrely got a shot of coastal California. I tried again with "norton,
virginia" and was able to sidle over to High Knob. Another Google service I just learned about is
scholar.google.com. I ran a search on " java eclipse" and got about 3000 hits, "java beans", about
8000, "css style sheet" -- about 1800. The results come from scholarly and professional jour...
I turned on the news this morning, and heard about the United States Government wants Google to turn
over it's search records. I'm sure you all know, but in case you've been living in a
cave for quite some time Google is an internet giant with a number of various internet services
offered, the service in question its massive web-search database that gets millions if not billions
of searches a day making it the largest AND most profitable search engine ever. The government went
to Google and asked them to give them their database records of all searches mad...
Google has just acquired YouTube.com website: The founders of YouTube posted a video (what else?)
where they talk about the acquisition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCVxQ_3Ejkg Check out the
grins on these guys!...
Hi all.. Check this out: www.writely.com Its a new service from Google for simple and secure
document colloboration and publishing product! I can call it as online Word Processor which is
rocking in its Beta time itself! /biggrin.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0"
alt="biggrin.gif" /> They wil aslo provide some mal address to which you can send documents
directly! You can upload or create new from the sitre itself! /cool.gif"
style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="B)" border="0" alt="cool.gif" /> - Each attached document
will be converted...
Hi guys, I came across this site called Writely - which offers you an online browser-based
Word Processor , quite similar to what Microsoft is trying to offer in it's Windows Live. What
suddenly caught my notice was this one single line right below their site logo that says - QUOTE
The Web Word Processor ...that's now part of Google. Digging
further I came upon this article at Red Herring describing Google's buyout of this company
and the subsequent assimilation of their software into the Google system.. My guess is...
Google's feed reader has undergone a major facelift. Thank God that the developers realised
that the old scrollable interface just wasn't practical enough for users with lots of feeds.
Categorization has always been a requirement to handle feed overload. New features: * Expanded
view and list view (similar to Gmail, list view shows only the title and a small snippet, while the
expanded view shows the entire post) * Simplified sharing functionality (just click on the share
link, and add snippets from blog posts to a public page. You can share that page with yo...
Google Image Labeler
- A new feature of Google Image Search that allows you to label random i (11)
A new feature of Google Image Search that allows you to label random images to help improve the
quality of Google's image search results. How does it work? You'll be randomly
paired with a partner who's online and using the feature. Over a 90-second period, you and your
partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to
describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner's label, you'll earn some
points and move on to the next image until time runs out. After time expires, you can exp...
Google's released 4 new search related products as mentioned in this article in InformationWeek.
QUOTE Google today introduced four new search products and promised to operate with more
transparency. Before a few dozen journalists from around the world gathered for Google Press Day
2006, company executives offered a broad overview of the search giant's future direction,
reiterated its focus on search, and spoke of plans to open up. Ironically, the wireless network that
Google had set up for guests was down at the time. "The Google story is getting more c...
Rumours have been flying around for quite a while about a Google Music service which is to be
announced in about 6 months time. I tracked a bunch of articles on this and recent news indicates a
very high probability of this happening for real. Here are some exerpts from those articles... Read
the sources to find out more. QUOTE(SearchEngineWatch.Com) Elinor Mills has a brief post
reporting that Bear Stearns analyst Robert Peck is predicting that Google will offer a digital music
download service in the three to six months. Bear Sterns is using the name the name "Go...
Google Labs seem to be churning out products incessantly.. Recently, a Google employee named Erika
Joy leaked out a couple of screenshots of their soon-to-be released product called Google Notebook
, due for launch sometime next week at: http://www.google.com/notebook It's supposed to be a
tool that blows the living daylights out of the likes of del.icio.us . It's going to be a tool
for gathering data from all around the web (bookmarks or actual content), nicely categorize them and
add related metadata and finally publish it if you want. Looks like it's...
According to recent news on eWeek.Com, Google's going to release the combined byproduct of their
past few years extensive research and development efforts on the AJAX Framework at the Sun JavaOne
conference at San Francisco. The kit, titled as Google Web Toolkit or GWT is going to provide
an exhaustive framework for Java-AJAX developers and is going really simplify development of
applications similar to Google Maps or Gmail ever for the non-experts. QUOTE(eWeek.Com) The
GWT (Google Web Toolkit) is a Java software development framework that simplifies wri...
Google has patented for a voice activated search engine in 2001 and has recently confirmed and
granted, this will help the business people and other users to easily search websites, and will make
the searching experiance even better. So if you have microphone, you can now easily surf the web
using that. just think how far ahead and better google is making it's search engines, and now
that they have patented that it will be hard for other search engine companies like Yahoo and MSN to
compete with that. Here is the link to the patent site and application: http://www...
The "Aero" look for Windows Vista will be available only for users with genuine copies of the
windows os..users need to go through the genuine copy test online to acquire the aero look. "Aero"
includes translucent windows, animated flipping between open programs, and icons that show
thumbnails of opened files. This was stated in "Windows Vista Guide" a document that was briefly
posted in its website and then pulled by Microsoft for whatever reason. Windows Genuine Advantage
(WGA)- Microsoft's anti-piracy program checks for genuine Windows running in the user&#...
Here is what they wrote on their signup page check it out http://pages.google.com/ QUOTE
About Google Page Creator Want to create an online photo tour of your vacation to Bali? An overview
of the South American precipitation cycle for your science class? A shrine to your pet ferret?
Now's your chance. We're testing a new product that makes creating your own web pages as
easy as creating a document in a word processor. Google Page Creator is a free tool that lets you
create web pages right in your browser and publish them to the web with one click. There...
Are you tired of all those unreliable dating services? Would you like to find your soulmate online?
Here's the solution to all your problems - Google Romance! Their unique computer-guided system
will help you find a person perfect for you in no-time! For more information, visit
http://www.google.com/romance/ lol /smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)"
border="0" alt="smile.gif" />...
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