This has been reported by Alexandre Dulaunoy on Twitter: Google Talk keeps track of your SMS!

Goodiff, a service for automated tracking of semantic changes in web service policies, reported the following change: “When you send and receive SMS messages to or from Google Talk, we collect and maintain information associated with those messages, such as the phone number, the wireless carrier associated with the phone number, the content of the message, and the date and time of the transaction.”

This can lead to potential, involuntary data leak… SMS are too often considered as a secure way to transmit information (like temporary access codes).

In 2007, Google acquired Postini, a global leader in on-demand communications security and compliance solutions. It looks that Google introduced some nice features based on Postini technologies to prevent leakage of sensitive data.

Google Apps Premier is a full set of online collaboration tools (email, calendar, IM access and office applications) offered to organizations. But lot of them are still reluctant to “move into the cloud” (for excellent reasons that I fully understand).

Like in Gmail Premier, Google introduced some features in Apps to increase the overall security:

• Custom outbound mail filtering tools to prevent sensitive information from being distributed.
• Custom information sharing rules to determine how broadly employees are allowed to share with Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Sites.
• Custom password length requirements and visual strength indicators to help employees pick secure passwords.
• Enforced SSL connections with Google Apps to ensure secure HTTPS access.

This is off course very “light” and does not replace a true DLP solution but this is a nice initiative. The goal is clear: attract more companies to move to cloud computing.

Source: google.com.