The Register reports today that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has issued a warning to potential users of Google Desktop (version 3) to configure it carefully.
The program’s “Search Across Computers” means some very private files, such as your web histories, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, PDF and text files in your “My Documents” folder could be held on Google’s servers for up to a month.
The idea is that you would login to your Google space and be able to search your own files from another PC. You can exclude filetypes and folders , but EFF has raised its proverbial eyebrows as the new version of Google Desktop could unleash a whole new set of security problems for non-technical users.
If you need more advice on computer security (and who doesn’t?), I can recommend The Hacker’s Nightmare, which I have mentioned several times in this blog.