So one of Amazon’s territories went down for a substantial amount of time last week. This isn’t the first time that’s happened.
I don’t like clouds. I have accounts with a few cloud backup services but I only use them when I can’t get to my usual concrete resources. But the reason I don’t like The Cloud isn’t to do with the fact that I don’t run a hot little start-up or that I can’t afford to spread my business across several cloud providers and/or time-zones. I don’t like clouds because I don’t like eavesdropping layers between me and my private data.
Private data. It’s bad enough that so much of our personal details are no longer private. You would have heard about Apple collecting location information on its users but it’s not the only violator. Google do it too. Then, to add salt to the paper cut, popular cloud back-up service, Dropbox, recently amended their Terms of Service to say the following:
As set forth in our privacy policy, and in compliance with United States law, Dropbox cooperates with United States law enforcement when it receives valid legal process, which may require Dropbox to provide the contents of your private Dropbox. In these cases, Dropbox will remove Dropbox’s encryption from the files before providing them to law enforcement.
The old adage of “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to be worried about” is well and truly beaten to a pulp by that career Roman Catholic, Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, who said in those racey days of the early 1600s:
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
Reference too old for you? How about Professor James Duane on why you should never talk to the police.
So, coming back to one’s data, I hate that a foreign government has access to my private information. Lest we forget, the US government has a long and cosy history with its corporations. Some standout moments include:
- Overthrowing the elected government of Guatemala on behalf of the United Fruit Company (here, here and here for official documents).
- Project ECHELON that eavesdrops mostly on non-military targets across the world; i.e. governments, organisations and businesses. This is an ongoing initiative and there have been a few spats over the decades about how the USA has used information gathered by ECHELON in Western Europe to give US corporations competitive advantages.
- Derailing open-source in Vietnam
- Quantitative Easing
A lot of collusion dates back to way before the interconnected Web 2.0 world that we now live in. But of course we don’t even have to consider the US government to talk about corporate collusion. Both Google and Yahoo! have collaborated with foreign national governments and Blackberry will too if it hopes to continue doing business in the Middle East.
With all these interested government queries, software back doors, location polling and decryption-on-demand, is it any wonder that I’m nervous about (a) where my data is being stored by all these magnanimous corporations (Gmail, Dropbox, Apple, Yahoo!, Android, Facebook, Twitter, ad nauseam) and (b) how long for?
So what’s the answer?
First, open-source software. Microsoft isn’t open. Neither is Android. Neither is Chrome. And, despite what the fanbois may tell you, neither is Apple. The only open-source operating system software in the world is Linux. Proper Linux, not its partly-closed variants as developed by Google and Apple.
Tangible back-up resources. I use a combination of my other computers, USB sticks, SD cards and external hard disk drives to back up my data. When stuck, I will use the cloud, but I’m sure to delete my stuff off there as soon as possible. (Not that that’s a guarantee. Who knows which governments are slurping the data even as I upload them?)
If you use the cloud and decide to delete the more private files, remember to delete the server versions as well.
If you have to use the cloud to store data, use your own encryption before uploading. Never ever depend on cloud encryption.
And educate yourself a little. I know those EULAs are a pain but you’re not going to learn anything if you don’t read them. And it’s no use clicking past all those windows only to declare, a year or so later, that “I didn’t know!”. If the computer is a big part of your working life (as it is mine), it behooves you to know as much about that world as you do about your own immediate reality. Because, let’s face it, in this world, your computer IS your reality.
It’s ten o’clock in the morning. Do you know where your data are?
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As a tentative user of Dropbox, I didn’t read the amended ToS. Oh well, if the US govt is that desperate to read my early drafts, they can I guess. I’ve pretty much accepted that Google has mapped my life, Facebook is trying and others unknown are probably capable of it — looking at you, Amazon, and my reading habits. My USB stick remains my main friend.
The problem I have with this is the sub-text that can be applied. So, Ms Schwartz, our research indicates that you appear to have an unnatural interest in Persian djinn? Why is that? What do you think of Iran? Have you been to Iran recently? Do you have Iranian friends? What do those friends do? Any of them involved in so-called “charity efforts”? Do they raise money and/or contribute to any clubs that you know of?
And that’s just off the top of my head, Jammy.
I know, it’s scary. And as for trusting that govts will behave sensibly — phooey!
My question: What are clouds? I’ve heard the word, but I don’t quite understand the meaning.
As for collecting data, that was a given the moment the big guns understood the potential of the internet. I have a feeling we haven’t begun to know the depth at which big business (never mind the government) has sunk its claws into my information. And what about every time you load software, photos, visit Facebook pages, or place an order?
There is no privacy. And while we may be able to track and remove our information at some sites, we’re bound to miss others, and those get pawned to third party vendors.
To borrow from Wargames (the movie), the only way to avoid the inevitable is ‘not to play the game’.
“The Cloud” is just a fancy new marketing name for an old old game; namely, thin clients. What it means is that your PC acts as a “dumb” machine. All it does is take information sent to it and display it on your screen. The actual processing AND storage of that data happens somewhere else…maybe even in another country. If you use a “cloud application” then nothing that you change on your PC screen is stored ON your PC. It’s all stored somewhere else. Or, to put it another way, you lose control over your own data.
We actually already use cloud apps for various things. If you use Adobe’s online facility to convert documents to PDFs (limit of 5 allowed), you’re using a cloud app. Play an online game? Cloud app. Arrange your pictures in albums on Picasa? Cloud app.
Thin clients used to be all the rage back in the day, with the ubiquitous Wyse terminals dotting the office landscape, but they were all serviced by a company’s own hardware, usually stored in the basement somewhere. They fell out of favour when “thick clients” were developed; i.e. machines that contained their own processing grunt…e.g. PCs. But now that the technology has scaled up, to the point that you can transmit data to a server a county/state/country/region away and still get reasonable response times, thin clients have come back in fashion again. I don’t know why. Unless I’m using protected infrastructure, I don’t care to have my bits and bytes flashing their values to anyone that’s capable of tapping into my data stream. Other companies obviously disagree with me.
Another consideration may be accounting. With your own infrastructure, you can only depreciate a certain percentage of your equipment costs over a certain number of years. By essentially outsourcing all your grunt computing work, you can claim 100% of that expense every year without worrying about obsolescence, equipment insurance and so on. I still don’t like the trade-off but, again, that seems to be just me and a few other stalwarts.