This is scary. It takes a lot to scary me, and this… is scary. Not scary like a horry movie. Not scary like someone’s holding a knife to my throat. This is scary in the sense that my mind is just worried.
Now before I give you the URL, let me describe it. The program is small. Larger than the typical virus, smaller than most windows applications. It runs with a very colorful, and might I add windows-like icon in your system tray. When double clicked, it launches a window that you probably use every day, but what it does is drastically different. Imagine, a program that is aware of everything on your machine. That means it can see your old chats, your old webpages, your old email. Imagine that it remembered them. Imagine that someone decided to allow you to search your hard drive using Google.
Oh wait… they did.
That’s right, a full fledge Google search engine that searchs your computer instead of the internet. It caches, indexs, and makes searchable everything on your machine including but not limited to your Word Documents, internet cache, and email. That, in my world is: SCARY.
Add to the fact that it’s nothing more than a webserver running on your machine and you’ve got what has the potential to be the world wide web being able to search your machine. That is a huge invasion of privacy risk for most people.
Needless to say the software found at http://desktop.google.com has the potential to be insanely dangerous. On the upside, it’s a very cool tool.
So give Google another mark… I figure it’s only a matter of time before they eliminate the need for windows all together… Then we’ll have a new evil.
Until then, I’m going to shut up again and do some homework. Either that or try to figure out the mentality that is the freshman mind and how it works in tightly spaced environments.
Later world.