The tech giant recently announced plans to start crawling documents published on its free document-sharing service. On its face, that may sound convenient, but concerned users and privacy advocates are worried that they may not be able to protect sensitive information.
Web spiders are set to start indexing Google Docs in about two weeks.
“This is a very exciting change, as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people," said Marie, a Google representative.
Google initially sought to give users the option to protect their documents by only indexing documents that fulfill two requirements: They must be published, and someone must have linked to them.
That policy has raised the concern that the only way for users to make sure one of their documents doesn’t appear in search results is to effectively render the service useless.
“Is the only way to ensure that your published document does not ultimately show up in search results to actually unpublish it?” asked tech analyst Sean Ludwig.
Kelli Roberts of AmateurDistrict.com told XBIZ that if Google follows through on this, she'll stop using Google Docs.
"It's not worth it," she said, explaining that her company has made extensive use of Google Docs to help share 2257 documentation with team members in different states. She said that these documents include the real names of more than 80 performers. Now she'll have to take it all down.
"I don't want our private documents, especially the 2257 stuff we were doing, spread out, especially since it could mean compromising the safety of some performers," said Roberts, who is Amateur District's head of marketing. "Clearly we don't want to find out that some insane, crazed fan showed up on the doorstep of one of the girls who performed in an Amateur District movie."
Further complicating matters is the absence of a feature in Google Apps, the master dashboard for Google's online services like Gmail and Docs. Google Apps apparently doesn't tell users which of their documents has been published or not.
"While it may well be obvious to most users how publicly available their Google documents are — and many of those published documents may well be intended to be as publicly available as possible — this seems to be another area where Google needs to find the right balance between transparency and data accessibility," Ludwig said.