google skeptic

Looks like somebody doesn’t want to piss off Cupertino too much. Emphasis added:

Google goes after Microsoft Office with word-of-mouth workplace marketing tools | VentureBeat

Google, the search engine company that recently announced its plans to expand by building a PC operating system to compete with Microsoft Windows, has launched yet another offensive aimed at ousting Microsoft’s other near-monopoly, Microsoft Office. The campaign includes marketing collateral meant to be used by office workers to convince their companies to “Go Google.”

Google Apps, which the company is pushing as a replacement for Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes, is a suite of browser-based tools that replicate and, in some ways, improve upon the most popular office productivity sofware: email, calendar, spreadsheets, text messaging, slide presentations. Google’s apps have nowhere near the feature sets of Microsoft’s versions, but Google is hoping to convince businesses they won’t miss Microsoft’s advantages.

Users access and control Google Apps through their browsers. The apps run in the cloud of Google’s server farms and other computers distributed all over the globe, and can be reached just as easily at home or on the road. “It’s all hosted by Google,” chirps the marketing home page for Google Apps.

But that’s the exact reason many IT staffers are reluctant to support Google Apps within companies. The thought of storing all of a company’s email, spreadsheets and presentations on Google’s website raises the security and privacy antennae on system administrators’ heads. Can Google ensure company documents won’t be stolen or lost? Just look at what happened to Twitter, whose corporate documents were pilfered from outside the company. And what happens when the Internet connection to Google’s servers is slow or down? Google needs to overcome these and other reactions among IT workers to the idea of browser-based tools.

Good morning?  Twitter’s corporate documents were stolen from Google Apps with passwords swiped from Twitter execs’ Gmail. This is a story about Google, yes?  Why omit that fact? Seems pretty relevant to the story.

read the rest via Google goes after Microsoft Office with word-of-mouth workplace marketing tools | VentureBeat.

Maybe Gmail doesn’t use encryption because Google figures that anyone willing to let them scan, index and cross-reference their email for advertising use can’t be very picky about privacy in the first place?

Google tackled on e-mail security

Google has been asked to explain why it is not making its Gmail e-mail service more secure.

In an open letter to Google boss Eric Schmidt, security experts, lawyers, and privacy advocates ask why Gmail users are “needlessly” being put at risk.

The 38 signatories want Google to start using the secure version of the HTTP protocol to protect Gmail users.

In response, Google said it was considering trials of the secure system with a select group of users.

“As more of us end up using insecure internet access – such as wi-fi in coffee shops, libraries, and so forth – there’s a real risk of session hijacking,” said Ben Edelman, a signatory of the letter and assistant professor at Harvard Business School.

When users sign on to Gmail, their login name and password are encrypted as the data passes back and forth using the secure version of HTTP known as HTTPS.

However, said Mr Edelman, this is turned off once sign-on is completed. A similar system works for Google Docs and Calendar.

The risk, he said, was from hi-tech criminals who snoop on the unencrypted data passing back and forth to steal ID files called “session cookies” generated when these applications start being used.

Mr Edelman said that using the cookies could let a criminal pose as a user. In Gmail’s case, this could mean they might send e-mails in the owner’s name, abuse their identity, change a password, or hijack an account.

“It’s a frightening prospect,” said Mr Edelman.

[more] via BBC NEWS | Technology | Google tackled on e-mail security.

One guess:

What Google knows about you

May 11, 2009 (Computerworld) “Google knows more about you than your mother.”

Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, recently made that statement to this reporter. A few years ago, it might have sounded far-fetched. But if you’re one of the growing number of people who are using more and more products in Google’s ever-expanding stable (at last count, I was using a dozen), you might wonder if Bankston isn’t onto something.

It’s easy to understand why privacy advocates and policymakers are sounding alarms about online privacy in general — and singling out Google in particular. If you use Google’s search engine, Google knows what you searched for as well as your activity on partner Web sites that use its ad services. If you use the Chrome browser, it may know every Web site you’ve typed into the address bar, or “Omnibox.”

It may have all of your e-mail (Gmail), your appointments (Google Calendar) and even your last known location (Google Latitude). It may know what you’re watching (YouTube) and whom you are calling. It may have transcripts of your telephone messages (Google Voice).

It may hold your photos in Picasa Web Albums, which includes face-recognition technology that can automatically identify you and your friends in new photos. And through Google Books, it may know what books you’ve read, what you annotated and how long you spent reading.

Technically, of course, Google doesn’t know anything about you. But it stores tremendous amounts of data about you and your activities on its servers, from the content you create to the searches you perform, the Web sites you visit and the ads you click.

Google, says Bankston, “is expecting consumers to trust it with the closest thing to a printout of their brain that has ever existed.”

How Google uses personal information is guided by three “bedrock principles,” says Peter Fleischer, the company’s global privacy counsel. “We don’t sell it. We don’t collect it without permission. We don’t use it to serve ads without permission.” But what constitutes “personal information” has not been universally agreed upon.

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