Government data, our data, now held by Google

I ran across this little tidbit of news over the Christmas holidays and it amazes me that more people aren’t asking if what is being reported is something we really want to see happening.

You see Google has been running a bit of an advertising campaign built around the fact that over 60% of the United States state governments are using part or all of Google’s Apps. I realized that the open source and freetard brigade will argue that this is a great thing given that it boost the whole idea of free and open source software in the public eye but stop and think for a minute.

60% plus. That’s 60% or better of states who are storing supposedly private and extremely personal data of ours on a third party server of a company thats sole purpose is to index all the information in the world.

Uhm.. did you give your state government permission to to this?

Are you really comfortable with the fact that Google is now storing data that it has no business being near?

As pointed out by Sherri over at philosecurity

In other words, according to Google, United States state governments have literally handed over our public data to be held and managed by a private company which has well-publicized partnerships with other governments such as China. The data is physically stored in Google’s buildings, on Google’s servers, managed by Google’s employees. This means Google now controls our government’s access to it’s own data.

I’m all for open source and free crap but when it comes to our data being held by any government it has no business being stored on a corporate server – especially a company with partnerships that include places like China.

Sorry this is a bad idea and one that should be stopped. It will only end badly.