In Emergic.org Rajesh Jain quotes Mathieu Balez on good god Google and the emerging scene of the computing world. Specifically he says:

You will literally no longer need any software running on your local computer (except the Google Web-browser of course, and a network connection). The computing experience will involve booting your computer, logging into the net, and having access to all your programs (and most of your data) which will reside happily in the ether - all protected and secure, we will be assured, by the good god Google.

This is a scary proposition as this entails your personal information being available to a private enterprise. This is true for most mails hosted on web servers like hotmail, gmail and many others. Google goes a step forward and scans these emails to generate revenue for that 2GB of mail storage. And personally i am okay with using gmail for my personal emails. Afterall there is little information contained in my personal mails that will hurt me if made public or otherwise. However there is a real danger of complacency kicking in. Once you make a web mail as your preferred mailing service its very easy to go ahead and use that for creating accounts for your banking transactions, and other such information that you would rather keep protected and safe somewhere with you.

But were the possibilities cited above to come alive, what then happens to all of your data. All files that you keep, all pictures and everything that is personal, and would be embarassing if not downright damaging in some way or the other, were this informaiton to become public? Either through malicious intent or because some hacker was able to access your information stored in a public server; or worse still a malfunction in the security setup of this web OS.

Would you then be able to trust such an operating system and replace your existing OS with such a web based system where the security, though guaranteed, may not provide peace of mind. Guess so, after all financial transactions over the highly insecure internet has become a reality.