How valuable is google docs? Valuable enough apparently for Twitter to trust it (and their biggest competitor) with a copy of their confidential notes, financials, and plans. In all the hooplah last week about Twitter getting hacked, I was surprised no one seemed to notice this.
In fact, some of the compromised notes directly commented on the status of negotiations with (and potential threat from) Google itself:
In a May 7 management meeting… the attitude towards Google is cautious: “Playing with fire here where we know that Google is building the competitive product.”
But by June 9, things seem to have progressed with Google. After an earlier two hour meeting with Google executives, the Twitter leadership had decided that an “agreement for some period of time makes sense - with our parameters.” But at the same time, they resolved to that Twitter’s own “search results page needs to be great - better than the landing pages on Google.”
While it’s unlikely Google management would sanction eavesdropping policies against competitors, it’s not hard to believe that a lone employee might occasionally do a key word search and stumble upon proprietary and potentially useful information.
I’m a big tech geek. I have enormous amounts of trust in both technology and many tech companies to do the right thing. Still, even I hesitate to put strategy docs on google, when a project may be competitive or otherwise relevant to google’s business. Whether or not Twitter management themselves trust gmail / google docs with this proprietary info, it’s certainly worth noting that it’s becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to prevent ALL employees from storing or transmitting info via Google.
It’s an issue that more and more companies (particularly web companies) are going to have to consider, and it’s something that Google would be wise to address (hello - encryption!) at some point (especially for companies that don’t trust ANYONE with their data).
Nonetheless, this says a lot about not only the utility of google docs, but also the inherent trust our generation of web startups has in each other to do the right thing. Trust is the future, “Do No Evil” is a requisite.
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