Google Calendar: Use at your own risk
When google calendar came out, I figured it was a privacy nightmare and I avoided it. My main concern was that google would hold a bunch of my information and then get suppoenaed or bought or accidentally leak the information out onto the net or something. Now I’m not an important person or anything, I just didn’t feel like it was a good idea.
So today I gave it a shot, after a friend suggested that I share her calendar. So I took a look and it’s got some cool features. Basically Google is taking a shot directly at Microsoft’s Outlook calendar program, but doing it server-side. It looks good, as their things typically do. The security model they’ve chosen seems fairly straight forward, but I will be that many many people will be bitten by this. I still think this type of program is best obtained clientside, but with the lack of development of non-MS calendars (is Sunbird ever going to pick up the pace?), maybe I will use gCal.
A calendar can contain many juicy pieces of information and google wants this, because it makes their program more powerful. I’m all for that, but again, I think people that don’t understand it will misuse it. Even those that do (like the semi-incompetant me) will probably accidentally post a copy of their social security card or something.
For instance, you can import a flight itenerary into google calendar directly. I haven’t done it myself, but I wanted to see what the process was like so I did a quick search for “google calendar flight”, and found this interesting blog post where a guy stalks (for demo purposes) some lady who left her calendar wide open:
Use with google with care folks. As they get bigger, we should all worry more.