Mountain View (CA) - With Microsoft no longer prominently pursuing the complete redefinition of the desktop computer file system, Google continues to push ahead with its plans to make all personal information queriable from a single search gadget. Google Desktop Beta version 3 - part of the company’s Google Pack software suite - has expanded its underpinnings yet again with the ability to search indexed documents across computers, as well as search personal e-mails using a toolbar integrated directly into Microsoft Outlook.

But few innovations in the software field these days are wholly without the threat of endangering life as we know it, and Google’s new and otherwise innocuous set of gadgets is not immune. Yesterday, the Electronic Freedom Foundation issued a statement alleging that Google could make portions of the information indexes collected on users’ systems and that they share with the company, accessible to the US government without their permission or even awareness. More on the EFF’s allegations shortly.

This screenshot shows Google Desktop v.3’s Sidebar in action along the right side of the screen. (The ticker along the bottom is supplied by another program, NewzCrawler.)

As with prior editions, the principal feature of Google Desktop is a Sidebar, which collects a series of informational gadgets, appearing by default along one side of the screen. First and foremost is the search bar itself, which as with prior editions, can retrieve a local list of results for a query phrase, compiled from both Google’s own engine and your own local index. Thus the search gadget pulls up indexed documents from your system, including e-mails and Microsoft Office documents. During our test, the search gadget could only pull up a partial list of matches from our local system, because the indexing procedure was still running in the background. With a system as extensive as ours, this one-time procedure could reasonably take several hours ; a few hours into our test, Desktop’s indexing process was still only 8% complete. This may not be the case with everyone’s household PC.

According to Google Desktop’s setup process, Google can collect information from the news pages you receive, to custom-tailor the list that appears in the News gadget. This is part of the program’s "Advanced Features," which users may opt not to install. During setup, Google provides this warning through the browser : "Google Desktop sends Google information about the news pages you visit in order to personalize the news you see in Sidebar. We use other non-personal usage data, including crash reports, to help improve Desktop’s performance. Please note that none of this data actually tells us who you are ; we use it merely to improve Desktop’s ability to give you the information that’s most relevant to you."

I happen to have a favorite news site, so I was curious : If I read a lot of TG Daily, would the News gadget start to favor articles by, say, Wolfgang Gruener ? If news articles’ sources or their content have any impact on the entries appearing in the News gadget, it may be very, very gradual. However, TG Daily’s RSS feed did immediately appear in the Web Clips gadget, as did selections from the RSS feeds for other prominent news sites I visited along the way. With the Web Clips gadget being so small, I can imagine TG Daily’s feed being drowned out on my copy of Google Desktop in a very short period of time, as I am a ravenous news reader.

But what would interest me more than a News gadget that customizes itself, is one that I could customize directly. The fact that I may happen to visit a particular news site from time to time does not necessarily mean I give credence to any RSS headlines that emerge from that site (no, I’d rather not name names). So I’d rather not have to weed its URL out of the News gadget list every time it makes its way back there. With the Email gadget, I can create filters that disable certain items from appearing in the list ; perhaps a similar filter for the News Options panel would be useful. I’m also curious with regard to Google’s list of "news editions," which are categorized geographically, with "U.S." appearing in our test by default. For most news sites I visit, I set my regional settings to "International ;" and I’m surprised that an International setting does not appear for the News gadget.

Google Desktop’s networkability does not yet extend to every feature or gadget in the program, however. For example, the automatic slideshow that runs by default in the "Photos" gadget cannot be redirected to display photos from another computer on the local network. However, you can have it search from RSS feeds or URLs (by default, the beta we downloaded receives pictures from the news blog Addict3D.org). I tried tricking the program by entering the folder location of a stash of images on my home network, as a file :// network path, but Google Desktop rejected it.

After Google Desktop is installed on a computer, any search results obtained through Google’s own Web page contain a count of how many other hits are linked to destinations on your own system. This kind of "freaky" capability is not generally understood by a number of users, which may be one reason why so much concern has arisen lately regarding how much personal information is sent to Google headquarters, and what Google could do with that information besides provide you with hit counts.

On the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s blog yesterday, staff attorney Kevin Bankston warned users about the dangers of even installing Google Desktop. "EFF urges consumers not to use this feature," states the EFF, "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." Here, the Foundation is referring to the Gmail password for Google’s e-mail service. While Gmail functionality is built into Google Desktop, such a password is not required, we discovered in our tests.

"Unless you configure Google Desktop very carefully, and few people will," Bankston is quoted as stating, "Google will have copies of your tax returns, love letters, business records, financial and medical files, and whatever other text-based documents the Desktop software can index. The government could then demand these personal files with only a subpoena rather than the search warrant it would need to seize the same things from your home or business, and in many cases you wouldn’t even be notified in time to challenge it."

Of course, a lot of that statement depends on what one might call a "Clintonian" read of some of the words therein - for example, the definition of words such as "have" and "can." While certain feedback is sent back to Google through the program, monitoring of our firewalls indicates that the index itself remains local. But since it is Google that is producing the index, and that index is being leveraged by Google software that now can be accessed across computers, with the advent of version 3 of the beta, the EFF claims, Google could potentially "have" everything that’s indexed on your system. And by virtue of the fact that search engines these days are fairly responsive to government subpoenas (in one prominent case, regardless of which specific government), the EFF argues, a government source could conceivably look into your private files without a subpoena.

A full appreciation of the EFF’s claim takes into account its having leveraged an emerging public fear from several recent episodes, including revelation’s of the US government’s secret surveillance program, and Yahoo’s (another pesky search engine) having turned over personal information about one of its subscribers, to the Chinese government.

"If Google wants consumers to trust it to store copies of personal computer files, emails, search histories and chat logs, and still ’not be evil,’" Bankston’s statement closes, "it should stand with EFF and demand that Congress update the privacy laws to better reflect life in the wired world."

Have you tried Google Desktop Beta 3 for yourself ? Have you felt that strange tingly feeling that comes with your civil rights being threatened ? Or is the smoke you smell coming from the direction of Google’s critics ? Tell us your thoughts. There are messages already in TG Forumz.