Confessions of a Mad Librarian

From CNN:

NEW YORK (AP) -- People who use public or workplace computers for e-mail, instant messaging and Web searching have a new privacy risk to worry about: Google's free new tool that indexes a PC's contents for quickly locating data.

If it's installed on computers at libraries and Internet cafes, users could unwittingly allow people who follow them on the PCs, for example, to see sensitive information in e-mails they've exchanged. That could mean revealed passwords, conversations with doctors, or viewed Web pages detailing online purchases.

"It's clearly a very powerful tool for locating information on the computer," said Richard M. Smith, a privacy and security consultant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "On the flip side of things, it's a perfect spy program."

Okay ... but 9 out of 13 system librarians would already know this, yes?

Managers of public access terminals can also install software or deny users administrative privileges so they can't install unauthorized programs, such as Google's. In fact, many libraries and cybercafes already do so.

Yay. But nothing's foolproof, right?

But policies do vary, and no precaution is foolproof, warned Carol Brey-Casiano, president of the American Library Association and director of public libraries in El Paso, Texas.

"We do our best to protect our patrons and computers and network, but as you can imagine, thousands of people can use public computers in a given week," she said.

But in the end ...

"It's not designed to be an illicitous tool," Mehta said of the Google software. "It's designed to be a search engine."

My question is, where will this be a plot point first: the Law & Order franchise or the CSI franchise. My money's on L&O, probably SVU, involving a detective with a search warrant for an apartment, a deleted file showing up in Google's DeskTop index and whether having the index open and active on the desktop constitutes 'in plain sight/view'. Just a thought.