• by Shankar Gupta , February 10, 2006

The online privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation Thursday blasted a new feature on Google's Desktop Search product, which allows users to search their home computers from any computer. The group said that Google's caching of users' hard drives renders them vulnerable to subpoenas.

The new feature, dubbed "Search Across Computers," caches users' text contents--including PDFs, spreadsheets, Word documents, e-mails, and other documents--on Google's servers, so that users can search them from any computer with an Internet connection. The EFF, however, claims that the feature puts users' data at risk. "EFF urges consumers not to use this feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who've obtained a user's Google password," the foundation said in a statement.

Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney with the EFF, said that the government might be able to subpoena users' information directly from Google, instead of procuring a warrant to search the users' own computers. And because the government need not always inform users about such subpoenas in advance, users can't contest the government's reasons for seeking the information until it's too late. "The upshot of that--unlike a subpoena to you, which you could move to quash--you can't move to quash a subpoena you don't know about," he said. "We don't think it's a smart privacy risk to store all your stuff with a third party like this."

Google currently is fighting a federal subpoena seeking a week's worth of non-personally identifiable search data. The court is slated to decide that issue on Feb. 27.

Google did not return calls for comment.