Google have announced a new version of their Desktop Search program.
One of the new features is called "Search Across Computers". You can read about it on the Google site.

"Search Across Computers enables you to search your documents and viewed web pages across all your computers.

Search Across Computers makes the following files searchable from your other computers:

* Web history (from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, and Mozilla)
* Microsoft Word documents
* Microsoft Excel spreadsheets
* Microsoft PowerPoint presentations
* PDF files and Text files in My Documents"

To make this function work the searchable files get uploaded to Google's servers.

For this feature to operate you need to use your Google account, the same one that you use for Gmail, Orkut and the other Google services.

This means that if an attacker can obtain your Google login details, he will be able to access your confidential files.

The good side is that this feature is an option and is not turned on by default.

We advise you to keep it that way.