Google Apps / Android Patch Being Rolled Out to Fix Security Issue

As I mentioned in my post yesterday regarding Google’s Chromebooks and the “cloud” based model for data storage, there are potential security vulnerabilities with this approach. Today’s news is that the Google/Android vulnerability announced yesterday will be patched. This from Google:

“Today [May 18th] we’re starting to roll out a fix which addresses a potential security flaw that could, under certain circumstances, allow a third party access to data available in calendar and contacts. This fix requires no action from users and will roll out globally over the next few days.”

Of course, this follows the announcement a few days before that Dropbox, a poplular remote file synch and storage service, also put user’s data at some degree of risk. http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/security/229500683

For the vast majority of users, these issues are probably not big deals. These examples really should only serve as reminders that anything done digitally is potentially vulnerable. Opening the process up to a network only adds a different layer of risk that should be considered when thinking about moving all apps to the network.