Schneier talks about Google Desktop Search

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Bruce Schneier is a well known authority in the security world and he makes some very good points about Security and the Google Desktop Search Engine.

I downloaded and installed the desktop search engine and was quite impressed with the information it was able to provide after indexing the disk. Those Google guys really have it down when it comes to indexing and retrieving data.

I eventually uninstalled it because of many of the things that Bruce points out...not Google doing anything wrong, just that it highlighted the insecurity present on my system. Kind of freaked me out so it had to go. Plus I'm not a big fan of a local proxy server running on my box (who knows what that thing is doing).

Typically when an employee gets canned at a company, the sysadmin usually grabs a copy of their harddrive before the user gets the word that they have to go. This is so they do not lose important data and can check up on what the employee has been up to. I see the Google Desktop Search as a perfect tool to posthumously analyze the dearly departed employee's disk for any "interesting" information.

So do you really think you are computing anonymously at work???