Monday 30 August 2010

Thing 20 - Creating a Google document and sharing it

Google Docs are not new to me so I'm back on more familiar grounds here, although I'd not shared a document before. Google Docs on the whole are very straightforward, convenient tool for storing documents on the Internet rather than on a hard drive.

My main concern, as mentioned when blogging about Thing 1 a little while ago, stems from questions teased out by Prof. Lilian Edwards during her Arcadia seminar talk regarding privacy settings and ultimate ownership of any documents housed on a Web 2.0 platform: can we really trust that Google does not take a peak at them (spy?)? I don't believe that. And what happens more specifically in the case of confidential documents? Or when someones dies, which was the basis of Prof. Edwards' talk?

All in all, I'll carry on using Google Docs as a convenient emergency measure but wouldn't be happy to use it for sensitive documents, despite the ease with which it allows us to share working documents with colleagues.

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