Google Desktop (again)

CNN's story on Google Desktop has an inaccurate title, but the jist of it is important: "Google software allows remote access to PCs".

As Jeremy points out, the key line is:

Despite the privacy concerns likely to be raised, Google executives are confident the product will appeal to many people wanting a way to use a home computer to hunt data stored on an office computer, or vice versa.

In other words: Hang the firewall, hang the VPN, hang the infosec policies, and trust Google to give off-site employees access to internal data.

Now, there may well be applications for the cross-machine indexing that Desktop does. I said earlier that many people benefit from having Google store and index their data. But, this particular piece of marketing seems to be aiming to raise a lot of objections, especially in larger corporations. The whole "search the world's information" thing is going to have to be a bit subtler.