Research firm Gartner has joined the chorus of voices expressing concerns over the potential security risks of the latest version of Google Desktop. The firm has concluded that the danger of company confidential data being intercepted outside the corporation's firewall represented an 'unacceptable risk'.

Gartner recommends that corporations that have company sensitive information and have users who wish to use Google Desktop should upgrade to the Enterprise version that allows the 'Search Across Computers' feature to be turned off for all employees. The analysts also suggest that company's conduct an audit of the data they are allowing be indexed, and decide whether they are happy that they can adequately bar the sharing of data with Google's servers.