In his presentation, Schmidt reportedly referred to three products under development, Gdrive, GDS and Lighthouse, that together would enable Google to store 100 percent of a user’s computer data.
Blogger Greg Linden is credited with being the first to catch the big news, and quickly posted quotes taken from the presentation that stated, “With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc., and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc.).”
In essence, Google’s Gdrive would mirror a user’s hard drive and, in Schmidt’s words, become a “Golden Copy” of the user’s data, offering protection against crashes, while the hard drive would serve “more like a cache,” offering fast access to data for everyday use.
The news spread rapidly across the Internet, and by the time Reuters picked up the story, Google had already taken down the original presentation and replaced it with an Adobe Acrobat file with the inadvertently leaked notes deleted.
Google spokeswoman Lynn Fox admitted to Reuters that certain portions of the presentation were removed because they were never intended for publication, but did not confirm plans for the online storage projects.
The idea of Google -- or any company -- storing every aspect of a person’s digital activity, from personal writings to Internet searches, instantly set of a round of speculation about security issues from bloggers, who pointed to the U.S. government’s recent attempts to force Google to turn over user data.
“The more I think about this, the more I’m not comfortable with the idea of having all my data in one place, any place,” Searchblog’s John Battelle said. “Google or otherwise, it simply makes abuse too easy.”