We make no bones about it: we love web hosting, we love the Cloud and we love colocation solutions. Here at Quotecolo.com we love getting our hands dirty in data centers and expanding our IT product knowledge. This said, maybe it’s time we talk about an obvious elephant in the room when it comes to Cloud Computing: the Cloud is dangerous for many reasons.
Consider, for a moment, the implications of Edward Snowden and the NSA. For the past two years – more if you throw Wikileaks into the bunch – the world has been treated to a front row online seat to the dirty work of global governments and corporations. Is the United States government utilizing your Cloud based tech to peak into your lives? You know it. Are global MNC’s collecting your purchasing data, spending habits and marketing routines to better control/sell product to you? You know it.
It would be a stupid thing, in this day and age, to fight the notion that governments and corporations are using our mobile, Cloud happy, Big Data driven world against us. For all intents and purposes, the past two years have shown us while everything and everyone is now connected to one another through some digital format, that hyper-connection comes at a price: privacy.
Let’s back up. The basic premise of Cloud is information on demand precisely because it is stored in some far off data center running 24/7/365. Underlying this basic premise is the idea that we, as a culture, are willing to share vital personal information about our lives online to companies, governments and other people who we will – outside of the context of commerce – never meet. Implicit in the Cloud is sharing. We share everything. Online we are encouraged to share everything. We share everything for convenience and accessibility.
This said, what if the Cloud – what if sharing everything – really isn’t a good thing? What is Cloud Computing solutions coupled with social media networks, form remember fields and tracking cookies pose more a threat to our personal security than they do an everyday convenience?
In this vein, we would like to take the time to state plainly: it is time to revert to local storage and ditch the Cloud. Moreover, it is time to critically judge what we share with connected networks and more importantly, why we share it. As I write this, I am sitting in IndianapolisInternationalAirport waiting to catch a flight to San Francisco. Although I am not currently surfing the web or looking up anything online, by the mere fact that my machine is connected to the airports Wi-Fi connection means I am sharing data about my whereabouts. My IP gives me away.
I for one personally love the idea of privacy. While I share a fair amount of information online, I don’t think it is smart. For the things which I – you – really hold dear, it might be best to forgo social networks and Cloud based solutions in favor of a boring old USB stick or a password encrypted external hard drive. While both solutions are “old” technologies, they both provide great storage capacity at a cheap rate. Moreover, while you can easily purchase a 2 TB external hard drive for $100 on Amazon, for that $100 you get a feeling which the Cloud cannot provide you with – personal security.
In poker the saying goes, “you can’t lose what you don’t put in the middle”. In the Cloud, the saying goes, “you can’t lose what you don’t share”.
Some things are best left private out of the hands of our hyper-connected Cloud sharing culture. Some things deserve better than the Cloud. Some things deserve local, “old”, local storage solutions.