Google Desktop Privacy Issues (i called it)
 

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Friday 15th October 2004 22:47 GMT

Google's Desktop represents a privacy disaster just waiting to happen, a rival has warned. David Burns, Copernic CEO, says users should know that the giant ad broker intends to mix public and private queries in the future, leveraging its key moneyspinning product: contextual advertising.

"If you lined people and said, 'Stick your hand up if you want Google to know what pictures you have, and what MP3 files you have,' I don't think many would." Burns had offered these capabilities to partners before, but received some pushback.

"Major brands don't want to compromise their reputation. We've offered this in the past to potential partners, and had a major PC hardware company and major portals say 'No, we can't do this'", Burns told us.

With the subpoena-happy RIAA getting support from state law enforcement in its war on copyright infringers, Google represents a single point of compromise for millions of file traders.

Copernic offers a native Windows search application both as a free download and as a branded offering to partners, and has toyed with merging the two before. But it's realized personal archives are very different to Google's snapshot of the web - and the queries are different too.

"I don't deny desktop and web on the same page is attractive," he added. "But we're not going to do it."

Burns was former US chief of FAST, which created the All The Web search site before selling it to Overture. Yahoo! now owns both.

Google Desktop Search allows users to opt out of sending the company back detailed usage data, but it isn't possible to firewall it completely. Much more ominously, reckons Burns, Google's product manager Marissa Mayer said she expected the private queries to generate more hits for google.com. Most people, she believed, would choose to combine personal and web searches resulting in more revenue for Google's ad business.

"As a result, we will serve more Web results pages and more ads, and those ads have more chances of getting clicked on. So there will be incremental Web search revenue from this product," she told the Washington Post.

In January, Eric Schmidt said the company's goal was to create a "Google that knows you". With the addition of personal information, it's just taken a giant step towards that goal. ®

things are going to start going bad for google...

now they're just taking advantage of everyone they're surfers and webmasters.. they're going to loose a lot of advertisers...

I deleted that shit from my PC a few hours after installing it.

This was my concern.

lol,

I love the part where it says "a rival has warned"

if I were googles competitor I would also make such claims ,

i never downloaded it because i knew well that it would contain something like that

funny you mention this, i just read:

Privacy and Google Desktop Search
Google is commited to making search on your desktop as easy as searching the web. We recognize that privacy is an important issue, so we designed and built Google Desktop Search with respect for your privacy.

So that you can easily search your computer, the Google Desktop Search application indexes and stores versions of your files and other computer activity, such as email, chats, and web history. These versions may also be mixed with your Web search results to produce results pages for you that integrate relevant content from your computer and information from the Web.

Your computer's content is not made accessible to Google or anyone else without your explicit permission.

You can read the Privacy Policy and Privacy FAQ online.


http://desktop.google.com/privacypolicy.html

I think google will be alright even without the ads... it extends the brand as google being #1 and the ONLY choice when it comes to any kind of search. This tool is awesome.

Exactly ther point. It's FAR too biased to be able to take the claims seriously at this stage. :glugglug