"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."
If the feature is disabled by default, exactly how carefully must someone configure Google Desktop to prevent the scenario above? I certainly don't think that, by any reasonable measure, simply pressing a button to confirm preset options can be considered difficult. So, I would consider the above statement fairly inaccurate. At the very least, the EFF statement is promoting the spread of inaccurate information. The perfect example of this being a reporter on CNN Thursday morning saying that users of Google Desktop would have their information sent to Google servers (following a quote from the EFF).
The "search across computers" options is DISABLED by default. The user has to turn it on, and only then is any data stored on Google servers (and then it is only stored on the servers for no more than a month). CNN was repeating the same inaccurate statement this morning.
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"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."
If the feature is disabled by default, exactly how carefully must someone configure Google Desktop to prevent the scenario above? I certainly don't think that, by any reasonable measure, simply pressing a button to confirm preset options can be considered difficult. So, I would consider the above statement fairly inaccurate. At the very least, the EFF statement is promoting the spread of inaccurate information. The perfect example of this being a reporter on CNN Thursday morning saying that users of Google Desktop would have their information sent to Google servers (following a quote from the EFF).
The "search across computers" options is DISABLED by default. The user has to turn it on, and only then is any data stored on Google servers (and then it is only stored on the servers for no more than a month). CNN was repeating the same inaccurate statement this morning.