Research firm Gartner is the latest company to warn organizations of the security risk presented by Google's Desktop 3. In a report, Gartner concludes that the danger of company confidential data being intercepted outside the corporation's firewall represented an 'unacceptable risk'.

Version three of the Desktop file management tool includes a controversial 'Search Across Computers' feature which allows a user to set certain files held on a particular machine to be made available as part of the search results from another PC. The problem is that the information is actually held and indexed on Google's own machines for up to 30 days and is transported across the Internet, potentially making it vulnerable to interception. More