Update: 10/19 10:35 EST by B: Headline and text corrected as per comment (thanks to griffey and apologies to all)/
From Canada.com comes another analysis of the pros and cons of the new Google Desktop Tool. People who use public or workplace computers for e-mail, instant messaging and web searching have a new privacy risk to worry about: Google’s free new tool that indexes a PC’s contents for quickly locating data.
Among others quoted in the article, director of El Paso (TX) libraries and ALA President Carol Brey-Casiano said,
“We do our best to protect our patrons and computers and network, but as you can imagine, thousands of people can use public computers in a given week.”
The new Google tool would not only aid people in spying on past patrons on public PCs.
The power of Google’s software relies on centralizing what’s already saved on computers; most browsers, for instance, have a built-in cache that keeps copies of web pages recently visited. The difference is that Google’s index is permanent, though users can delete items individually. And the software makes all the items easier to find.
Not Google Print, Google Desktop
I was very confused at this synopsis, until I realized that they had identified the wrong Google tool.
Desktop is the new integrated Google search for individual computers, and yes, there are certainly privacy issues for shared desktops.