Watch Out For “G-Drive”

November 29th, 2007 22:18 pm | by Ed |

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The article in the Wall St. Journal doesn’t come right out and call it “G-Drive” but that’s pretty much what this latest project of Google’s is.

It’s a service where people will be able to store files on Google’s computers so that they’re accessible from any PC with an internet connection. While I can see a certain amount of benefit in something like that, I would also strongly recommend that NOTHING be uploaded to something like that unless it were first encrypted.

The reason for this is simple… Google’s penchant for indexing everything it comes in contact with and for analyzing any text it can find to help them customize context sensitive advertising… The same reason I would never ever ever use a gmail account for un-encrypted emails. When search engines (or any third party really) have access to documents you must consider the content of those documents to be compromised unless you’ve encrypted them.

My preference would be to either PGP encrypt individual files or to put collections of related files in Truecrypt containers and then upload the containers.

Technorati Tags: privacy, on+line+backup, on+line+storage, encryption, pgp, truecrypt