In an article dated yesterday, PCWorld cast Google Desktop Search as the invader stealing and copying secure information. (Does Google Desktop Search pose a risk?) Is that the real question we should be asking? Halt your pondering. The answer is no. Google only finds what is there. The question should be, "Why is all this private data there?"
Good security is hard. Hard to use. Hard to implement. And hard to sell to email-using grandmas. This explains the prevailing attitude of "If they don't know where it is, they can't find it". This, easy to implement, type of security is called "Security by Obscurity" and has been proven as secure as having no security at all. If your secure web-based bank transactions are available via GDS, blame your web-browser for saving it, or yourself, in some circumstances, for not turning on a security feature.
GDS has not created a problem. It has revealed one.
