Another Dark Cloud 2
December 1st, 2009 by ComputerBob
Regular readers of this Journal know that I’ve never had much good to say about “cloud computing.”
In fact, I’ve always had serious concerns about its security, access, privacy and control, among other things.
But today, I read about a situation that makes me even more vehemently “anti-cloud.”
Google Docs has inexplicably marked some users’ perfectly innocent documents as “inappropriate,” and won’t allow them to be shared with others.
Does it bother you that Google analyzes all of your Google Docs documents to determine if they’re “appropriate” or not?
As always, Slashdot’s readers have a lot to say about that.
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Consumer Info, Dubious, Education, Internet, Rights, Security
December 1st, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Here’s a good article on cloud computing — and it is scary. It mentions that Obama’s CIO had, in a previous position, moved the District of Columbia’s email to gmail and encouraged the use of Google apps.
http://www.businessofgovernment.org/pdfs/WyldCloudReport.pdf
December 1st, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Thanks, Mike!
December 2nd, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Today, I received an email, asking if I would consider writing about some of “cloud computing’s” good points. Here is what I replied:
“Of course there are ‘good things’ that people can say about ‘the cloud.’ Nothing in this world is ‘pure evil.’
But it is my viewpoint that ‘the cloud’ is such a very bad idea overall, and it has such devastatingly negative probabilities, especially in the Internet age, that I would not want to promote it, even slightly, by pointing out its ’silver lining.’
To me, it’s not a matter of ‘Here are some good things about cloud computing, and here are some bad things about it. Let’s make the best of it.’ On the contrary, to me, the short and long-term negative aspects of cloud computing completely overshadow and outweigh any possible mitigating factors.”
If you want to read things that say that “cloud computing” is a good thing, Google, Facebook, Myspace and many other major Web sites each spend millions of dollars telling everyone that cloud computing is a good thing, without ever warning users about its many downsides — because they all have a huge vested interest in collecting and mining their users’ private data. That’s where they get those millions of dollars.
So I’m just going to stick to warning people about the many downsides, even though I know that my contributions won’t balance out more than a tiny smidgen of the tons of self-serving cloud-computing hype that those other sites publish.