Christopher J. Buckley

Google Desktop Search is perhaps the one program that makes Windows worth using again…however, as i’ve spoken about previously, your privacy is drastically reduced after you install this search utility. The contents of your computer will now be contained within one directory on your filesystem — imagine if this contents was read by someone you did not wish to have access? Google has an option to ‘encrypt index data’, but this is false security — Microsoft backdoors this (already weak) algorithm, and anyone with administrator rights to your PC can simply change your account password to decrypt the index.

The answer is to allow your desktop index to reside on an encrypted drive. However, google does not allow you to directly change your index location. Here’s how you over-come this…

Load up “regedit”, then navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Google\Google Desktop\

Change the file data_dir to your new, custom, location:

Exit regedit, restart GDS.

Done!