Sunday
Dec022007
Online productivity tools and their security risks
Sunday, December 2, 2007 at 7:43PM
As I've promised in the past, I'm trying to blog a bit more... So here yah go.
Do you trust me with your personal documents, financial bank statements or list of passwords to your online services? I hope not. So why trust online productivity tools like Google Docs and Zoho with it? These sites offer a great service but there is a time and a place for everything. I use Google Docs for a lot of my collaboration and document sharing for my consulting work however I don't use these services for my personal, secure and confidential information. This would be like asking a stranger to hold onto my passport while I go away on vacation.
All of these services offer a privacy statement (Google and Zoho both do) and I don't believe that they lie about how they use your information. One thing I do think is that they are still an internet and public service that always has the possibility of misusing your information or worse yet, allowing others to misuse your information. Two things I've learned in the security world is that 1) nothing is totally secured and 2) people make mistakes. I just logged into my Google Docs the other day and saw that someone had shared a spreadsheet file with me by accident. They must have clicked to share the file with everyone in their address book. Lucky for that user I'm a nice person (hah!) and I emailed them to let them know about their error -- not everyone will be that nice.
If you're going to use these services to modify and keep your documents online, I recommend using some sort of tool to encrypt the files before upload. There are plenty of file hosting services out there that will allow you to host files that are not necessarily documents or spreadsheets. And hey if you feel so inclined, you can send them all over to me at sucker (at) srcasm.com and I will host them for you myself... I promise, I won't read them.
Do you trust me with your personal documents, financial bank statements or list of passwords to your online services? I hope not. So why trust online productivity tools like Google Docs and Zoho with it? These sites offer a great service but there is a time and a place for everything. I use Google Docs for a lot of my collaboration and document sharing for my consulting work however I don't use these services for my personal, secure and confidential information. This would be like asking a stranger to hold onto my passport while I go away on vacation.
All of these services offer a privacy statement (Google and Zoho both do) and I don't believe that they lie about how they use your information. One thing I do think is that they are still an internet and public service that always has the possibility of misusing your information or worse yet, allowing others to misuse your information. Two things I've learned in the security world is that 1) nothing is totally secured and 2) people make mistakes. I just logged into my Google Docs the other day and saw that someone had shared a spreadsheet file with me by accident. They must have clicked to share the file with everyone in their address book. Lucky for that user I'm a nice person (hah!) and I emailed them to let them know about their error -- not everyone will be that nice.
If you're going to use these services to modify and keep your documents online, I recommend using some sort of tool to encrypt the files before upload. There are plenty of file hosting services out there that will allow you to host files that are not necessarily documents or spreadsheets. And hey if you feel so inclined, you can send them all over to me at sucker (at) srcasm.com and I will host them for you myself... I promise, I won't read them.
Reader Comments