It may have won rave reviews when it was launched last week, but some observers say Google’s free search engine for Windows PCs could undermine a user’s security.
Google Desktop Search (GDS) searches through the emails, documents and web pages on a PC’s hard drive as quickly as the Google search engine scours the web. It does this by spending a few hours indexing the drive’s contents, allowing it to perform much faster searches than a PC’s built-in search facility.
But PC World magazine has pointed out a security risk: GDS searches throw up snapshots of previously accessed web pages, including those normally protected by a password. These could include bank statements or, say, an Ebay account, allowing anyone else using the PC to see this sensitive data. This happens because GDS indexes the “cached” copies of web pages that browsers store.
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Google says the tool is not meant for use on a shared or public computer – and points out that users can instruct the program not to index secure pages. “Google doesn’t have a security problem,” says cryptographer Bruce Schneier. “What’s fascinating is that the problem arises because Google is too successful at what it does.”
