Smart software

The recent Beta release of Google Desktop 3.0 was downloaded and installed by a large number of PC users mostly unaware that the new software lays you bare to snoopy eyes and hackers, says Vijay Upadhyay

Got a neat stash of images or secret love-letters hidden somewhere in your computer away from the eyes of your wife and the rest of the world? Then take care before you install Google's new desktop search software.

After peering in your homes through its satellite imagery-based software, Google Earth that "de-classified" the classified satellite images of military installations around the world, is all set to peer into your computers connected to the internet.

This new beta release of Google's software could pull these files out of your systems and place them on display, bang on your desktop or in the worst scenario, make them available for search to millions of hackers across the internet, if you install the software with all its default options enabled.

Unless you configure Google Desktop very carefully, and few people will, 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.

According to The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocate that has issued a warning against the use of the software to the internet users, the feature of Google Desktop that has raised the worst uproar is the facility called "Search Across Computers" that lets users search content on multiple computers logged on through the same Google userid on the internet, though there is a catchphrase to this seemingly innocuous feature. To use this feature, the users would have to agree to Google's conditions to allow it to transfer references to all files like images, Word, PDF files into its own computers where they shall be kept for atleast 30 days before being purged by the server.

Initially designed to work across a limited set of files like browsing history, word documents, excel files etc., the final release of Google Desktop would encompass a diverse range of files that could include images too and bloggers on the internet are concerned of the fact that any hacker, possessing a Google user's password, could easily access these files through the Google servers.

According to the latest info made available by bloggers on the internet, the US authorities have already requested Google to make available random samples of the searches made by the internet users through Google's search engine and though the company had not yet agreed to provide this data to the authorities, there was no guarantee that the company would not succumb later on to the demands by the US authorities for access to the user data on its servers.

But everyone does not appear to be alarmed by this loss of privacy, claiming that the features that were on offer in the new Desktop software by Google made it worth a slight trade-off on privacy.

The Beta release of Google Desktop 3.0 that was released recently was downloaded and installed by a large number of PC users in Agra, without showing any qualms to the loss of privacy after the installation of the software in their systems.

Talking to The Pioneer, Mugeev Khan, a cyber-café owner in Agra said that a large number of computer users used the internet just for some casual browsing and chatting which was not something to be concerned about but still, if privacy was a major concern, then the best thing was to abstain from installing the software in your system. He said that if you were willing to trade off some part of your privacy for the features provided by Google Desktop, this new software could revolutionise your PC experience giving you never before facilities of having all internet features offered by Google through a simple, uncluttered interface.

Besides, he said, the software offered full support for customisation of its features and even if that was not acceptable, the outbound traffic from the desktop could always be blocked using a decent firewall, rendering the files in the computer safe from the prying eyes of the hackers and the US authorities.

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