You may have heard a lot of cloud computing recently. And if you did, your opinion may have been formed depending on which computer geek you spoke to. I myself like to arm myself with opposing geek positions and then I form my conclusion based on the geekiest and scariest of arguments.
And concerning the Cloud: It freaks me out.
You trust your data to be there when you want it and need it. You trust that no one will hack it. And you trust it all so much that you don’t retain a copy for yourself but just store it on the ‘Cloud,’ reaching up from time to time when you want to grab a hold of something important.
In theory it sounds in part like it could work. Why worry about storing your data on your own hard drive, which when corrupted, can’t operate. You may lose everything. All those photos.. songs.. everything.
That is when the cloud get tempting.
But …. and here is the big big but, you really can’t say you own it anymore. You sign away things through legal terms of agreements that you don’t understand. And just in case you believe me to be a prognosticator of doom, here is a story from Agence France-Presse about Steve Wozniak, the man who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs. The quote:
“I really worry about everything going to the cloud,” he said. “I think it’s going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years.”He added: “With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away” through the legalistic terms of service with a cloud provider that computer users must agree to.“I want to feel that I own things,” Wozniak said. “A lot of people feel, ‘Oh, everything is really on my computer,’ but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it.”
There are some computer nerds that are friends of mine whom I trust. And they have a problem with the cloud..
But I think all nerds, geeks, experts, and coders will agree: If Steve Wozniak is worried about the cloud and who owns the data, I think all of should be.
