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EFF Warns Not to Use Google Desktop
neelm writes "The EFF is asking users not to use the new version of Google Desktop that has a 'search across computers' option. The option will store copies of documents on your hard drive on Google servers, where the government or anyone who wants to may subpoena (i.e. no search warrants) the information. Google says it is not yet scanning the files for advertising, but it hasn't ruled out the possibility."
If I had to count on one company to stand up and fight for personal privacy, human rights and not bow down to political pressures, it would have to be teh Google.
Meanwhile, Chinese users please click here.
I thought it stored an index. I know this is bad enough, but if it was actual copies would be at least get a free back up out of it.
And, just as an addition, this is my explanation why I think we will simply stop worrying about this, for the most part.
Most of us have simply accepted that websites will leave cookies on our computer. But we, of course, have learned to manage these; we only keep the ones we want, and probably not for very long.
We don't seem to mind that every website gets our IP address, but the very private can uses proxies (plenty of FF extensions) if they wish.
There are countless examples like this, where we have these privacy invasions, but we've simply accepted them, and learned to manage them. Now, whether this is a good thing or bad thing might be an entirely separate discussion. So I think that we will accept our documents being stored anywhere, but we'll learn to be careful, still. You might use an online text editor to make your resume, but maybe you'll leave your contact information off it, and only when you're ready to print will you temp-save it locally, add that info, and then print it.
I just really think we'll all get used to not knowing exactly where our stuff is, but we'll know what to do if we really need to be careful about it. For a little while, at least.
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I'm using google desktop right now and for a while I've been wondering if there's anything better. What I really want is something that searches file/folder names for strings or words. I dont care a whole lot about the contents.
.jpg files for the above example. And something thats faster than that awefully slow windows search. Windows search usually does more of what I want than google desktop does, but dang is it slow, and not very flexible. Heck, I'd keep google if it had something to limit its searching to filenames instead of the insides of files.
For instance if I had a file names "my family pics from vacation to hawaii in 2006 2314.jpg"
I'd like to be able to find that with a search of keywords like:
family pics
hawaii vacation
2006 pics
etc. Currently google desktop turns up way too many hits, when all I want are files with those words in the filename.
So I want more of a filename (and foldername!) searcher than anything else. Bonus if it can only search
The article seems to be blaming Google for doing this. What the government takes from Google is not Google's fault, people should be gleaming their eye at the government for trying to delve into people's personal lives. Google is trying to create a service, and a very good service at that. Google is a privacy advocate, they are not destroying your privacy. All data they collect is very secure, and Google has shown they are willing to fight in court for users' privacy.
People should be looking at the government. In my opinion, if US Government uses Google to watch what people do on the internet, they aren't much better than China.
This is not Google's fault. Stop blaming them.
As for this statement:
"...while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who've obtained a user's Google password."
Google is pretty good about passwords. If someone gets your password, it's your fault. Second, I'm not convinced you can search your records remotely. The Google Desktop search runs directly from your computer, you can't access or search your files remotely using this feature. Proof: If you have it installed, what IP does it go to when you search your files? 127.0.0.1:4664 Oh snap, what a concept!
It's all bullshit. People need to start giving people the facts and stop praying on their ignorance.
The end.
google.slashdot
And Microsoft doesn't have private correspondence (hotmail, msn)? How about your ISP, does it have any? You can encrypt all way around, but then you'll have to make the recipients of your mail decrypt it. It's just easier to trust someone. Who you trust is up to you. I'd go with google seeing as they didn't bend over for the government like Yahoo and Microsoft did (and probably your ISP would).
If they can get every file on your desktop, and you are working on a new project you want to patent, how exactly do you prevent Google or someone working for Google from deciding they want to patent it first?
Google's not fighting for individual rights in that court case. Google's fighting for Google's rights, or, at its broadest, corporate rights. There's no issue of individual rights involved. So your pick of Google, and its nonsensical false choice against the EFF (why choose?), doesn't hold any weight earned by legal insight on your part. In fact, since the story we're discussing shows that Google's desktop search puts your privacy at serious risk, your sticking to them seems to have no merit at all, beyond your adorable belief in the power of a (nonbinding) corporate motto like "don't be evil".
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make install -not war
With all the recent commotion about domestic wiretapping without a court order I've developed an instinct to want to protect my privacy. I simply can't stand the idea that even if google as a corporation is doing no evil with the users' data, some evil employee might want to spy on his ex girlfriend or that guy in high school who boinked his first love.
This is not a double standard. Microsoft would be lynched because of their past history and willingness to break the law and abuse power. Google has a relatively (if not totally) clean track record. Consumers (and slashdotters) have yet to find a real reason to believe Google will follow a similar path.
When it comes to e-mail, I think most people don't have a choice in the matter. It's always stored on somebody else's machine. My gmail account can be read by google, my work e-mail can be read by my employer, my e-mail through my ISP can be read by comcast. Short of colocating my own email server, there's really no way to keep other people from reading my mail. And if the feds are really after me, they'll probably seize my colocated mailserver. Encryption is really the only way to keep your electronic communications private. I'm pretty sure the government still has a lot of trouble breaking a one time pad.
Remember, they have to send this using your personal internet connection. They obviously can't be sending the gigabytes of data required for a regular GDS search nor required to reconstruct that much. Then again, it's probably enough just to get some import documents.
I say to reverse engineer the protocol and use it as essentially an inifnite internet storage space. Encrypt your data, of course.
Oh yeah, couldn't google encrypt the information client side to prevent abuse?
If you have a gmail account, Google already knows who your friends and family are. That's okay if you can trust the company, and the political system.
Now Google seems to be becoming one of those amoral companies. The new Google Desktop takes advantage of people who don't understand what is happening. Is Google going from "Do no harm" to "Anything if it makes money"?
Unfortunately, the U.S. government believes that it can perform surveillance anywhere and can keep the reasons secret. The U.S. government often forces companies not to disclose that they have given information to the government. So, maybe no company can be trusted.
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Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & you pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?
I'm getting more and more annoyed at the privacy strategies of organizations like the EFF. I'm generally a big fan of them, I think I've even donated money (as a grad student that's saying alot), but like most online privacy activists they have a very short shighted view of privacy.
The attitude of many of these privacy activisits is somehow that we can draw a line in the sand and refuse to give out any more information about ourselves to anyone. Not letting google have our information is just another example but traffic cameras, search histories, purchase histories are others. I'm not going to argue about whether this would be worthwhile if we could do it here but it simply isn't achievable. At least for the near future people are going to continue to give more and more of their information to companies. Giving advice like 'don't use google desktop' and stuff like this just marginalizes the EFF in terms of privacy. If they took a more pragmatic approach they could do a great deal more good.
In particular in this case the EFF should recognize that SOONER OR LATER PEOPLE ARE GOING TO PUT PERSONAL INFORMATION ON SERVERS THEY DON'T OWN. The conveince benefits are just too great for people not to want their stuff accesable everywhere and the cost of running your own servers is just too great. Rather than telling people not to use any of these products and convincing a few people with privacy paranoia they should be concentrating on improving the protections that information will have.
Personally if I wanted any company to be the first one to do this it would be google. They are the most likely to mount a serious legal defense against any subpeonas or other legal challenges. The EFF should be working with google to beef up the legal and technical defenses not fighting a losing battle to keep everyone's information on their own computers. For a first step how about bargaining with google and withdrawing their recommendation that no one use google desktop (though of course still warn people about the possible risk) in return for a promise/money from google to lobby for tougher protections for such data. Someone is going to do this eventually and I would rather have the law and precedent shaped by google than MS (who might not even tell about subpeonas). Basically at some point the distinction between personal info and buisness records needs to be fixed for internet stuff.
As an aside I think the greater goal of restricting the personal info that is availible on you just isn't compatible with personal freedoms. Every one of us leaks tons of information in a thousand personal interactions a day. Many of these interactions happen in public and in full view of strangers/aquintances. Unless we impose draconian laws banning people from using wearable computers that aid name recognition and record snippets of what they see for later use or abridge people's freedom of speech to post video blog entries about what happened to them today eventually powerfull search technology will make tons of information availible online. The EFF should be figuring out ways to handle this loss of privacy gracefully (so poor people don't lose more than the rich etc..) and minimize the harmfull impact not trying to put the digital genie back in the bottle.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
http://desktop.google.com/about.html
...
12. What about my privacy? Does Google Desktop share my content with anyone?
We treat your privacy with the utmost respect. Google Desktop doesn't make your computer's content accessible to Google or anyone else without your explicit consent. The application also offers privacy options such as locking search, encrypting the index, and not indexing password-protected Office files or secure (HTTPS) web pages.
If you activate the Search Across Computers feature, your indexed files will be sent to Google Desktop servers for copying to your other computers on which you've also activated Search Across Computers. Your index and data files are never accessible to anyone via a Google web search. And if you don't activate Search Across Computers, your Google Desktop index and data files never leave your computer.
You can learn more by reading the Google Desktop privacy policy or about the Search Across Computers feature.
One's right to protect own privacy doesn't come with footnote saying "If you don't lock your door, you'll loose your right." One's right to protect own privacy should be honored wheather door is open or locked. Feature hindered to enable and a distance one has to go to take advantage of those features which is to protect privacy, cannot be viewed anything less than to evade one's privacy.
Google shouldn't make it as an "Optional Feature" to protect the privacy of its users, but make it ONLY feature to protect privacy. There is no room for hypocricy when it comes to where one stands in a land of bullshit.
Google's intent is clear. Google may "do no evil," but it surely does a lot of "think evil" and I'm more afraid of that.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
I have a big question. Why is everyone so uptight about the rights of "American citizens", and apparently not concerned about the rights of visiting foreigners in the US?
All the Bush-haters have seizures every time they can complain about him 'violating' the rights of American citizens. Does this mean if the only people 'spied' on were foreigners, you guys would be OK with it?
Personally, if I went to France to live, and found out the government spied on me for no reason, I would be pissed even though I am not a French citizen. If I went to China, I would expect to be spied on, whether I was a Chinese citizen or not. The US Constitution does not specify that non-citizens have no rights, the Fifth Amendment applies to the government's actions, not the nationality of the person.
So please, for the love of God, stop ranting about "American citizens", because you are just showing your ignorance. Rant about people. The Democrats/liberals/anti-bushies can't seem to figure it out. But the Republicans/conservatives/pro-bushies don't seem to notice the contradiction either.
"Rather than telling people not to use any of these products and convincing a few people with privacy paranoia they should be concentrating on improving the protections that information will have."
EFF is concentrating on this: they've announced a major lawsuit against AT&T for participating in the government's illegal wiretapping program.
But the surveillance powers of the state have expanded many times through the Bush Administration (and Clinton was hardly a friend of privacy, for that matter). So while it's important to put corporations on notice that their participation in surveillance might land them in hot water, it's likewise important to let the public know that corporations are often left with no choice, and required to surveil them secretly (e.g., because of FISA warrants, or through CALEA wiretapping).
EFF isn't pursuing a monotonic "stop sharing your information" strategy. It's approaching this on many prongs: lobbying the government to sunset the PATRIOT Act, asking the Supreme Court to strike it down, suing companies that participate in surveillance, publishing best-practices documents for privacy-friendly server-logging, and warning the public about the potential for privacy ruptures arising from law and practice.
It's unfair to characterize EFF as merely wagging its fingers at the public. The organization is pursuing this on every possible front.
(Disclosure: I am a former EFF employee)
Whenever I hear or read something from the EFF it sounds like "don't", "no", etc but never "do" or "yes". I thought this here
http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
would mean quite a lot of freedom but the EFF doesn't even answer my mail. Doesn't EFF work for the freedom or doesn't EFF understand what it means? What shall I do so this freedom sinks into their minds or what can I do to make this future become true?
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
*sigh* I'm getting really tired of seeing this kind of bullcrap spouted all over slashdot whenever Google gets mentioned. Believing point blank that google is evil because they now have a china specific version of their search engine is ludicrous.
Firstly the chinese specific portal was created because the experience delivered by their worldwide portal was less than adequate (whether this is the result of filtering thanks to the great firewall of china I don't know). As a result people in china now have a search engine that works. Does it filter out some content? Yes, but it clearly indicates when it has. As a result people in China now get a search engine that lets them know clearly that information is being censored (which may spur some to try and find what that is), and they are being given a resource which cannot possibly filter out everything, there will undoubtedly be holes through which the chinese people can educate themselves.
Ultimately the chinese people see a gain from Google opening its china specific search, which is what it's really about isn't it; the good of the chinese people.
Well, what I think is going to happen is we'll all be fine with storing documents off site, but only when they're encrypted and the storage entity doesn't have the key. Key management will be an issue, but it wouldn't be too hard to have your keys stored by a third party that's not owned by the party who's storing the information. Hell, the key storage entity could be offshore in another country like Switzerland who won't just bend over when the US government wants to data mine everyones documents.
AccountKiller
I use the same layout, but I get files that could belong to more than one directory all the time. I'm not going to constantly adjust my hierarchy and recategorize all my files every time this happens. Organizing email like this also is a pain. Gmail does a pretty good job of letting your filters apply multiple labels to a single email. Basically the equivalent as putting the same email in multiple directories. I can see the benefit of the same functionality for my filesystem. Now that it supports Firefox and Thunderbird, I've been thinking I'd give it a try.
Granted Google Desktop is free (as is enterprise edition for now too, except support is $10K/yr), there is a very funny side to this too. Most people these days have *way* too much memory and CPU, considering the tasks for which they are using their machines. I mean computing, not realtime 3D rendering, sound synthesis or maneuvering bloated app bits around. The computing side of machines. Personal computers these days have enough power these days to run powerful search engines of their own without farming it across the net. I myself am very happy Google is doing this since last year I designed a simple program that has some of the same functionality and now I can point to Google and say "but my system is safer". How long until those neat ethernet equipped hard disks come with similar searching/rsyncing features? Anyway I keep rating everything I see against the BeOS (now Zeta) live search query folders. So far that is the best darned thing I've seen.
I find it kind of amusing how they're saying "don't use Google Desktop", "Google is storing your info that can be accessed easily by the government" and such, yet if you go to eff.org the search is "Powered by Google". Just funny...
I agree, however the average joe blow that is buying a new dell that has Google desktop installed when it arrives, don't get the option to choose, nor are very many people informed about the data collection they perform.
Joe Blow may not have the option to choose whether or not Goodle Desktop is installed on his new Dell, but he certainly has the choice of whether or not to purchase that Dell. If Joe Blow chooses to purchase a computer and he chooses to buy a Dell specifically and he chooses not to read the list of software pre-installed on the machine and he chooses to leave the software on the machine after he receives it, how can he not be personally responsible for Google getting information about him.
This is kind of like the tiny fine print on a contract. Also there isn't an 'I Agree' button on the Google Search website, people think they are just looking up information.
There may not be an "I Agree" button, but there is a link to "About Google" where there are links to little things called "Privacy Policy" and "Terms of Service."
When will people understand that Google isn't hiding out in a dark alley hitting passerbys over the head and stealing information. They put out a big colorful sign that says, "Our goal is to organize the world's information" and people come to the big colorful sign and throw information at it. Google has bills to pay and they pay those bills by harvesting, organizing, and re-selling (in a way) that information. Everybody wants something for free, but don't want to believe the reality that nothing is truly free.
Are you one of the people who felt the woman was justified who sued McDonalds for serving her hot coffee because there were not significant warnings that it was hot? Where does personal responsibility end?