Are Google Docs templates secure?

Posted Friday, 18 July 2008, 09:24 HST @725

Google Docs, the company’s online office suite, now lets people create and use templates. There are many examples already posted in Google’s template gallery, including invoices, resumes, invitations, mileage caluclators and calendars.

Avery Dennison has already posted a number of templates for their self-adhesive labels. Now I have one less reason to use Microsoft Word, and the folks at TastyPopsicle seem to agree with me: see their article called Oh hell no, Google’s got templates!

I’m sure there are security concerns. How hard would it be for someone to post a template that lets users record their web passwords or credit card information, and then sends back that valuable data to the developer? Google’s videos don’t mention any of these issues - instead, users are told that they can email template-based documents to friends, who can fill them out and return the data in their email client.

Before trying these templates, I suggest changing your Google password to something stronger, like a passphrase, or using a Google account that doesn’t have much or any email or data in it. It’s much easier to set up a fresh Google account than to figure out who’s looking at your data.

There’s more information and a couple of videos in this Google blog article called Templates bring Docs to life.