Security considerations are important if you are using find or
xargs to search for or process files that don't belong to you
or over which other people have control. Security considerations
relating to locate may also apply if you have files which you
may not want others to see.
In general, the most severe forms of security problems affecting
find and related programs are where third parties can bring
about a situation where those programs allow them to do something
they would normally not be able to do. This is called privilege
elevation. This might include deleting files they would not normally
be able to delete. It is also common for the system to periodically
invoke find for housekeeping purposes. These invocations of
find are particularly problematic from a security point of view
as these are often invoked by the superuser and search the whole file
system hierarchy. The severity of any associated problem depends on
what the system is going to do with the output of find.