Is Google Going into the Storage Business? - The Downside of a GDrive

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In all honesty, I expect Google to work hard on the security and privacy issues surrounding any possible GDrive. And it’s entirely possible that some of those sounding the alarm on these issues may be making a bigger fuss than necessary. For instance, if you read Mike McEwan’s recent article in which he reviews the Google Desktop upgrade that includes Search Across Computers, you’ll see that he makes an interesting discovery. It is not nearly as difficult to set up the service in a configuration that does not index everything as the Electronic Frontiers Foundation seemed to imply when they warned people about it.

But there are other issues that have nothing to do with Google’s own hardware. One of them is legal, and yes, it concerns privacy. According to Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s technology and liberty program, there are different protections covering information on a person’s own PC, and that same information being held or stored by a third party. For example, law enforcement officials can often ask or demand information from banks about an account, without the account holder’s knowledge. While the laws governing online storage of information are less clear, the potential parallel is unsettling to say the least.

“I’m sure Google does worry about this question: if we are going to store everybody’s data, what are our obligations with regard to privacy and security and what will be our legal obligations to protect it? They have all this private data and if it escapes in an unauthorized way, it can do an awful lot of harm,” said Steinhardt.

A somewhat more pedestrian concern is bandwidth. Not everyone has a broadband connection to the Internet. No matter how much data you’re dealing with, you can download or upload it only so fast. And this could become an issue not only for those with slow Internet connections. When Google started offering Google Analytics (in beta, naturally), the company underestimated the demand for the service. As a result, many users were frustrated during the first week because they could not connect to their accounts consistently. Analytics is the kind of service that appeals specifically to businesses; what kind of online traffic jam can we expect from a service that will appeal to everyone with a computer? Can even Google’s legendary data centers handle such an onslaught?

Of course, a lot of this is going to depend on how many people decide they want to use the service, which is, after all, currently still theoretical. The concerns are real, however, and Google had best be prepared to address them before putting the GDrive into beta.

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