Google and Privacy

I've been meaning to write about about Google and privacy, but I've been a bit under the weather. It should have caught your attention when the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned consumers not to use the Search Across Computers feature on the new Google Desktop for fear that contents of documents on your network would be indexed on Google and more easily available to the government by subpeona rather than search warrant. Hopefully law firms will recognize that careful tweaking and configuration setup is in order if they use this product. BuI I don't have to go into the details because Catherine Sanders Reach of the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center has posted some great information on the controversy surrounding the new Google Desktop Search. 

Don't forget that there are desktop search applications that run on your computer and are not linked to the huge online search engines. X-1 and Copernic get high marks.

I'm not generally not as concerned about Gmail. Although you may see ads triggered by the subject lines or words in an e-mail that give you concern, none of this information is apparently saved outside of your inbox.