Risk with Google Docs
Google docs is a really great solution, both for personal usage as well as business because its free, online and has all the features you need from an MS Office sort of product. If you need to send a power-point presentation to your boss regarding your last months sales figure, your company don’t even need to buy any license of MS Office. Just open a google doc, make your presentation online and then your can either share or send it as an email to your boss. Your boss also don’t need MS Office to be installed on his machine, because he will be able to view your presentation through google docs. You can have a look on following screens for a better understanding:-
Google Docs
Google Doc's Spread Sheet
Gmail has been the best email service since the first email was launched. Whether we talk about its rich and optimized user interface, its jabber based chat client, its web 2.0 based functionality, its powerful antispam technology or hundreds of other features, Gmail has a score of ten out of ten in all of them.
But, when we talk about security, from my opinion there is not much of innovation. If a new functionality is added to make better applications, security issues arising out of those new functionality should also be taken care of.
Gmail has all the basic security implementations like SSL and email encoding. In fact chats are also encoded. But, google docs which gives you free access to create documents in different formats like word, excel and ppt has two serious issues when it comes to using this for your business or personal use for storing critical data.
Since google docs is integrated with your gmail also , so anyone who can access your gmail account can access all your google documents, modify, copy or delete. Lot of people store their critical data like passwords etc in local excel files. But, very recently people have started shifting to online storage. There is one big difference between these two modes of storage – i.e online vs offline, which creates huge insecurity issue for your data. When your store offline, your data is insecure only if your computer gets accessed by someone malicious and who can crack your system password. So, offline storage gives your data physical security.
But, with online storage your account is open to the entire world and there is just one thin line which separates your critical document and malicious hackers and that is your password. So, storing your critical documents online on google docs will depend on your password security. If your password is leaked, your are at a very high risk of losing your critical documents.
Secondly, when google docs are updated, auto-saved or saved manually, then the contents are not sent encrypted which means if you are storing something critical then the contents can be sniffed very easily by a malicious person using free and commonly available tools on internet live Ethereal,GMT etc. Even a person who just knows how to run a program can do that and he don’t even need to know any technical stuff of hacking.
I hope to see some updates on google docs or may be we will see google docs in a different form in future, where we will be storing our documents online without any fear of risk.
data loss
Nice article, indeed, but I have one question: I’m a huge fan of google Docs and it’s become the only software I use for editing files, both personal and professional. I thought it was safer, as all the time I’m working on it the url shows “https”… but it scared me what you said about changes being sent not encrypted when auto-save is enabled.
Do you know of any updates about this issue from Google?
Regards,