Everyone just love to toss around the word disruptive these days as if it is the all fixing panacea for our software woes and nowhere more is is being used than in conjunction of another buzz phrase cloud computing. The combination of the two is creating a pie in the sky attitude that by relying totally on applications accessed via the internet we are traveling down the road of progress and that everyone is a winner as a result.

The problem is that we aren’t winning anything. On the contrary we are in danger of losing more than we can imagine. AS we get sucked into the idea that we can save money by using all these free services that are running on someone else’s servers we lose sight of who owns that data. Sure we can philosophically believe we own our data that is sitting on some server out of our control but the physical facts speak otherwise.

I have a lot of admiration for people like Brett Nordquist who can so easily move into a world where Google has complete control over all his data and not even think twice about it. To have the ability to switch to a cloud computing world where any ownership or control of what you enter is no longer yours. Sure you can access that data or information from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection and that is the whole ideas biggest selling point. People are willing to use browser based software that is in a constant state of flux and things are added or removed in exchange for not having to pay anything - except having their data used as fodder for advertising.

But what about the security of your data? With cloud computing you are relying totally on some 3rd party to make sure that your information is safe from prying eyes; whether it be the company’s employees; ala Facebook kiddies invoking superuser access and dancing through people’s profiles, or government agencies deciding that they want to know everything about what you are thinking and writing. In this day and age of FBI “Letters” and DHS “requests” that data is no longer yours and no-one has to tell you anything.

Then there is always the case where the holder of you data decides for whatever reasons to make you disappear - literally remove you from any online existence. Whether like Robert Scoble you break some oblique terms of service that can change at a moments notice should the company decide to. Or as Mathew Ingram points to a post by danah boyd who relates how a friend had their Google account hijacked at which point the account was deleted for terms of service violations. A person’s whole online existence was gone in a split second - they no longer existed - their online lifetime of data no longer existed.

Now granted both Robert Scoble and danah boyd’s friend were able to be literally resurrected but only because they had connections. What happens though to those of use that don’t have those types of connections. What happens to Brett if he pisses off the wrong person and suddenly he has government eyes watching his Google accounts and documents or Google decides arbitrarily that he has done something wrong and wipe him from the internet.

In all this warm and fuzzy of being able to be apart of a community living in the clouds of Google, Microsoft and the endless social networks we are forgetting one important thing - basic human nature. As much as these providers of cloud computing proclaim they are secure the first rule of computing is so easily forgotten. What one programmer can lock up behind a so-called wall another programmer can just as easily break through. While we might like to believe that our data is safe in those clouds some-one somewhere; whether they be and individual or an agency, will want to see what that data is.

Is all this really worth having your person information used to feed some advertising platform somewhere?

Listening to: Mind in a Box - Dreamweb - Tape Evidence

Conversation Tags: cloud computing, Google, Microsoft