Putting Your Information in the Cloud is Like Putting Your Money in the Bank, Do You Trust Banks?

Cloud computing seems to be the wave of the future, and I just hope that the cloud is not made of CO2, because it would cause us to choke to death. And speaking of death, what happens if you have all of your personal data, important family photos, and all your information stored in some data center, or cloud somewhere and the data center has a cyber attack and they lose everything for you? Personally, not just for privacy reasons, but also for safety reasons, I would rather back up everything I have on a DVD, or several of those and put them into a safe, for safekeeping somewhere.

As our virtual lives and real lives merge into one, we are going to want to protect all of that data so that it doesn't get destroyed, or hacked into, or perhaps someday used against us. And when I say used against us, I also mean some corporation rummaging through our data with a super computer algorithm to identify us as a particular buyer of their products and services. I'd just as soon keep my privacy as long as possible, although I'm coming to the realization that in the future that will be indeed impossible.

An interesting article to read might be one which appeared in the Wall Street Journal on June 6, 2011 titled "The Cloud Drifts Closer to the Consumer" by Ian Sherr that discussed the issues with users storing their music, videos, pictures, etc, in the cloud and not on their own computers or within the hard drives of their devices. Still, I'd ask why? If you have a personal device which is able to store the information and it hardly costs much money for many Gigabytes of data storage, why do you need the cloud at all?

Now then, let's compare this to money. We put our money in banks, but right now they don't give us any interest for it, because interest rates are so low. Then they charge us to use our own money at the ATM, and they charge us to have a bank account, which is either free if we leave lots of money in, or a monthly fee for the privilege of them holding our money, and making it more difficult for us to use. That doesn't seem like such a great idea.

Likewise, why should we pay someone a fee for using their cloud data center, when we can merely buy a 50 GB iPad, laptop, or other personal tech device. The people who are promoting cloud computing seem to think they are offering something to the public that we need, but personally I don't really need it, and I don't understand why I would allow my data to be stored on someone else's computers, cloud, or in their data center.

Most small businesses agree and that information about their business is private, it's not for anyone else to see including the IRS which could easily subpoena that data from the cloud computing vendor, who else will want to go snooping? Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.

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