Slashdot Mirror
Google Slips Talk of Online Storage Service
sonsonete writes "Reuters reports that Google is preparing to offer online storage, according to company documents that were mistakenly released on the Web. From the piece: 'The existence of the previously rumored GDrive online storage service surfaced after a blogger discovered apparent notes in a slide presentation by Google executives published on Google's site after its analysts presentation day last Thursday.'"
But there's the worry that if Google did this, how long before the Bureau of National Security Over Privacy and All Else presses Google to make content of this online storage available to the FBI? RIAA? MPAA? Cheney Department of Vindictive Leaks?
It's thought provoking, certainly. Then there's the inevitable: I'll pass.A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Let's hope the stuff from your GDrive doesn't end up all over the internet like this presentation!
Developers: We can use your help.
Encrypt your files.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
The most interesting part of this story is this line: "With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)," the notes in the original Google presentation state. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt in his presentation made a cryptic comment that one goal of Google was to "store 100 percent" of consumer information." Now, this service might just be vapor. But if it is real. Why would I want to give all my very personal information to a potential advertiser? It makes me cringe all of the suckers out there that will store their private word, excel or other docs and have no idea how insecure it is.
XDrive, Yahoo Briefcase, anybody?
Of course, we had Web-based e-mail in '96, too, and look what Google did with that.
What is so damned cryptic about that? This has been google's strategy from the beginning, the more info they have about you, the users - the better they can market to you, the users.
I would be worried, of course, about the obvious bad possibilities that can from from this unprecedented access this gives google to our info. But that discussion has been played out with every google took.
I've said it before and I'll continue to say it, Google has BIG plans that everyone is not piecing together. Long story short, I expect to see Google linux sometime within two years (I'd wager this year). This distro will be intimately linked with the online side of Google for storage and software. This will mean that you can go from your PC at home to any webbrowser on the face of the planet and have all of your information as it would be on your own desktop. ALSO, there's a possiblity of seeing something like Sun has where you can have a desktop open with programs, web pages, and files and then go to another PC and have the same desktop open from either a webbrowser or a future version of Google desktop. What do you think all those mobile computing boxes and dark fiber are for? It's all to make Google local to everyone and very very fast. Wait and see.
Did you know that you can be apathetic to apathy? Not that I give a shit...
As soon as Google gives me all of their data, I'll give them mine.
66.35.250.150
User: ident
Pass: itytheft
I'm happy to be of service!
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
One has to wonder what, if any, restrictions Google has in place to keep GDrive from becoming a file sharing network, assuming it will actually come out.
Even if shares are only 2 GB (about the size of their e-mail accounts), that's still enough for at least one good-quality movie, or 100+ high quality MP3s. All one would need to do is set up a drive and disseminate the login info.
And what about legit use? I rip all my CDs to MP3s (because changing CDs when you get tired of them is a nuisance). My business allows me to store MP3s on my computer for personal use, but I cannot bring a flash drive or other writeable media (including CD-Rs) into the workplace. (Yes, having internet access kind of dilutes this, but I digress.) It would be easier for me to upload as many songs as possible and download them at work instead of trying to convince someone that my flash drive just has MP3s on it.
Maybe they can outright ban certain file types- mp3s, avis, etc. Of course, there's nothing stopping someone from uploading it as spiderman3.doc. And what about the college student that wants to upload a class lecture for later listening or sharing?
If this becomes a reality, it would be interesting to see how they work it.
Funny, but also a good point. However, I do have a fair number of relatively low security risk files that it would be handy to access anywhere without carrying them on a flash drive. Flash drives are useable almost everywhere, but not quite, and they can get lost, which makes them as much or more of a security risk as files on a fileserver. I actually save a bunch of miscellaneous bits of information as drafts on my gmail account for convenience, but it would be nice to do so as something other than plain text. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.
One would also expect that a google online drive would be roughly as secure as their mail account (same username and password, potentially different avenues for hacking, however). Email security is pretty important, so if a person is willing to trust their personal communications to Google, why not a few files? Besides, it's probably a lot more secure than the average user's personal computer.
So you think that a random Google employee has access to your inbox do you?
No-one at google reads your, mine or anyone else's email.
They're scanned for keywords by a machine and spat out into your browser. The same goes for your search results, too.
There's a big difference between someone reading your emails like some kind of wartime censor and a script running on a machine that adds contextual information. Do you object to Google adding BR tags to your email where it sees a carriage return tag (or whatever) in an incoming email. Are they 'reading' your mail then?
*walks off mumbling about paranoid americans*
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
And here is the quicker: Google could do that by releasing their Linux Distribution on a Live CD. Users would not even have to install Linux, instead they would merely boot on this Live CD. The environment would be heavily linked to the on-line Google services, and users could edit/modify/save their document transparently over the Internet.
My guess is that Google sees document storage as a beachhead for online word processing, etc. Convincing a business to adopt that kind of stuff will be very hard, because they have to change how their processes work. But if you're an indivudal logged into GMail, and you have a Word doc (or even better, a PDF) or some photos you want to edit and send back to someone, and a link saying "Edit this document" comes up, you might well want to do that. And because they're on Google's servers, it doesn't cannibalize their ad-based business model, and better still, it does cannibalize Microsoft's business model. Basically, by starting with documents, they can move piecemeal into application hosting without losing many options. Then if businesses are interested, they sell ad-free versions, hosted or non-hosted.