I’m profoundly disturbed by the growing emphasis on ‘cloud computing‘. Many companies, particularly Google, are pushing this technology, and computer manufacturers are beginning to sell devices (such as the tiny ‘netbook’ laptop computers) that rely on it.
The huge problem with cloud computing is that all one’s data (and the applications one uses to access it, such as word processors, accounting software, etc.) are stored on remote data centers, not under one’s immediate control. If one’s Internet access is cut off somehow, one can’t continue to work on the data locally – one’s helpless until the connection is restored. Furthermore, there’s the huge problem of data privacy. News of hackers breaking into commercial systems to steal credit card numbers, etc. is an almost daily event. If you think that any data storage company is going to put as much emphasis (and spend as much money) on safeguarding Joe Q. Average’s private data as a commercial enterprise will spend, I’ve got news for you.
Some argue that this doesn’t matter any more: that our personal, individual privacy is a thing of the past. I don’t agree. Say you store all your pictures on your computer’s hard disk. Now you switch over to ‘cloud computing’ and store them on a central server. Sure, it has advantages – you can access them from anywhere at any time, and you can share them more easily. However, what if among them, you have pictures that are extremely private – for example, nude or semi-nude pictures of yourself or your lover? What if your private diary is also stored there, with notes that are intended for yourself alone, never to be shared? What happens if a disgruntled ex-partner manages to use your sign-on ID and password to access them, and circulates them? You can secure your own PC against such an event, but not your online persona. Where does that leave you?
The Guardian has a good article highlighting these dangers in the light of a new product from Google.
Google is to launch a service that would enable users to access their personal computer from any internet connection, according to industry reports. But campaigners warn that it would give the online behemoth unprecedented control over individuals’ personal data.
The Google Drive, or “GDrive”, could kill off the desktop computer, which relies on a powerful hard drive. Instead a user’s personal files and operating system could be stored on Google’s own servers and accessed via the internet.
The long-rumoured GDrive is expected to be launched this year, according to the technology news website TG Daily, which described it as “the most anticipated Google product so far”. It is seen as a paradigm shift away from Microsoft’s Windows operating system, which runs inside most of the world’s computers, in favour of “cloud computing”, where the processing and storage is done thousands of miles away in remote data centres.
Home and business users are increasingly turning to web-based services, usually free, ranging from email (such as Hotmail and Gmail) and digital photo storage (such as Flickr and Picasa) to more applications for documents and spreadsheets (such as Google Apps). The loss of a laptop or crash of a hard drive does not jeopardise the data because it is regularly saved in “the cloud” and can be accessed via the web from any machine.
The GDrive would follow this logic to its conclusion by shifting the contents of a user’s hard drive to the Google servers. The PC would be a simpler, cheaper device acting as a portal to the web, perhaps via an adaptation of Google’s operating system for mobile phones, Android. Users would think of their computer as software rather than hardware.
It is this prospect that alarms critics of Google’s ambitions. Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, a charity defending computer users’ liberties, did not dispute the convenience offered, but said: “It’s a little bit like saying, ‘we’re in a dictatorship, the trains are running on time.’ But does it matter to you that someone can see everything on your computer? Does it matter that Google can be subpoenaed at any time to hand over all your data to the American government?”
I’m in full agreement with Mr. Brown on this – not to mention the other dangers I’ve cited. I think I’ll be keeping a honking great hard disk on my desktop, with all my personal files and data, plus software to access them. If computer technology moves on to the point where I can’t get updated or current versions of the software, it’ll be hey-ho, off to Linux and an older-fashioned way of doing things!
Peter
I work for a company that provides this sort of cloud computing.
Personally, all I’d be willing to put on a shared drive like that can fall into two categories:
1. Things that I am explicitly trying to share with other people.
2. Encrypted backups of data I don’t want to lose. (That is to say, backups that I have encrypted separately, and which the company providing the spare space has no key for.)
That’s about it. Not even just for the security issues – see also the issues people have had with keeping all their data on online services…which go away. There have been cases where people have had their complete photographic archive go *poof* in a shower of bits, and no way to get the data off because the computers are part of the assets up for auction in bankruptcy proceedings.
Totally agree. For all reasons mentioned, I’ll never trust ‘the cloud’. I read earlier today, too, that Monster.com was hacked and usernames and passwords stolen. Unforgivably, that data had *not* been encrypted, but was only protected by passwords. Very lazy software engineers.
Not to mention that internet speeds are nowhere near the 80MB/sec I just measured off my year-old hard drive, that a terabyte drive now costs $89 after shipping, or that you could attach your own hard drive to the net, to be accessible from anywhere, nearly as easily. [Would it be as secure? Well, if you are running windows, no, never, but that’s a different story.]
Then again, I’ve spent nearly a decade grousing about Microsoft’s attempts at pretending that the data stored on your disk doesn’t exist in a “tree” structure. They got something against being organized, or what?
I’m writing a novel about this very thing. When hackers take out the global hyperweb server, nobody in the whole world can access data, shopping, tv, phones, work…