Google Desktop’s Across Network Search Raises Privacy Concerns

I always raise red flags at any Google’s eating the world warnings. Plus, I’m a huge fan of the Google Desktop app that allows me to search my entire hard drive + external drives all in one interface. But Google is soon adding the capability for you to run Google Desktop on multiple machines across a network and search them all at the same time. This means Google would store copies of your hard drive on their servers.
Now that’s scary as hell.

Google today announced a new “feature” of its Google Desktop software that greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. If a consumer chooses to use it, the new “Search Across Computers” feature will store copies of the user’s Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google’s own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user’s computers.