Just passing this along for the Pessimism Department:
Google 'planning total storage'
Web giant Google is planning a massive online storage facility to encompass all users' files, it is reported.
The plans were allegedly revealed accidentally after a blogger spotted notes in a slideshow presentation wrongly published on Google's site.
The GDrive, previously the subject of chatroom rumour, would offer a mirror of users' hard drives, Reuters said.
Google declined to comment on the reports but said the slide notes had now been deleted.
In the notes, chief executive Eric Schmidt reportedly said Google's aim was to "store 100%" of users' information.
The notes said: "With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including e-mails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc; and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)."
No announcement
"We deleted the slide notes because they were not intended for publication," Google spokeswoman Lynn Fox said.
"We are constantly working on new ways to enhance our products and services for users, but have nothing to announce at this time."
Under the alleged scheme, if users suffered a crash and lost files, Google's own computers would have kept a back-up.
The plan for total online storage could meet difficulties with bandwidth constraints for some users.
The search giant recently decided to offer an optional facility that stores a copy of the text-based sections of each user's data on Google's own computers.
Time to turn on file encryption on my hard drive.
Lehrer News Hour did a story on Vista yesterday. During the discussion with the guests, they got to talking about Microsoft's competitors, and mentioned Google in the context of competing computing models, trends and future. There was also a link at PJM to a WSJ article about companies moving back towards central systems and dumb terminals for several reasons.
Central systems and storage is what Google is good at and is, likely, marketing to the very same people who find this systems approach beneficial for their own reasons and what Google meant by "users".
I don't think we googlers have to worry about the takeover of our personal computers until some crackpot can link it to reducing our carbon footprints.
Um .. wait ... Molon, what encryption would you recommend?