Head in the Clouds? Computing Out of its Mind

Earlier this year, Steve Wozniak spoke about the newest darling in the IT industry: cloud computing. The engineering mind behind the first Apple computers spoke openly about his concerns for cloud computing during a recent public appearance.

“I really worry about everything going to the cloud,” he said. “I think it’s going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years.”
He added: “With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away.”

He is referring to the huge terms and conditions documents computer users must agree with when accessing a cloud service.
“I want to feel that I own things,” Wozniak said. “A lot of people feel, ‘Oh, everything is really on my computer,’ but I say the more we transfer everything onto the Web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it.”

Some argue cloud computing is a reaction to music and film privacy because it overcomes the need for people to own files, thus eliminating their desire to BitTorrent or reproduce copyrighted content.
Take a look at Spotify and its worldwide popularity with more than 20 million users. Spotify founder and creator, David Ek, has publicly stated that Spotify is a reaction to piracy.

“I was born in Sweden, and in Sweden we are known for the piracy services,” Ek said in an interview with ABC News.
“I decided I wanted to create a product that was better than piracy.”
Ultimately, Ek said his goal is clear: “For us it is about getting it out to more people. We launched in the U.S. one year ago. We want to bring music to every single person and bring it to every moment of their life.”

It’s ambitious stuff from the tech pioneer, but it supports the ‘fair access fair price’ argument that Internet evangelists and content pirates have been belting out at the top of their lungs for years.
Though it does need to be examined, what happens when we no longer own our files?
Apple’s iCloud service has struck out the need for audio content on iOS devices when paired with their iTunes Match service.

With even the quickest glance at the GUI of iTunes 11, it’s design clearly encourages iTunes Match usage over loading your own content onto iOS devices. Sure, it’s easy to see the improvements of accessing your content across multiple devices and saving storage space, but obstructing content management in exchange for pushing cloud services?
I think there’s some bad Apples in this cart.

Looking at cloud computing services more broadly, the service presents huge problems with user authentication and digital certificates not exactly reaching the end game on privacy and data protection. The potential for malicious access and harvest of personal data is scary, especially when vendors lease a server from another service provider.

Rather than acquire new servers, a cloud vendor can take leases out on servers as a more cost-effective and flexible solution. This creates vulnerabilities that could result in customer data theft, a worrying prospect for anyone using cloud services for business sensitive data.
If the vendor lost access to the servers for whatever reason, the users have lost access too, a potentially catastrophic situation for customers and vendors alike.

Cloud computing also presents a range of regulatory challenges for Australian consumers.
At the Global Access Partners Workshop on Cloud Computing, Deputy Chairman of the ACCC Peter Kell, detailed its efforts in consumer protections from unfair cloud service agreements. The presentation detailed potentially anti-competitive contract terms, protection from data use in marketing and advertising practices and complaints resolution.

“The ACCC will be closely watching key areas of interest as cloud computing becomes more widespread. The ACCC’s aim in consumer protection regulation is to ensure that consumers can benefit from innovation and competition through minimizing the impact of market failures, information problems and rogue traders,” said Kell.

When stored on a cloud, personal data can be used to gain marketing insights to inform campaigns. This is because cloud computing blurs the definition of ‘personal data’ so much that arguing ownership would be nearly impossible.

It’s a slippery concept so let me explain: Let’s say you put your couch into storage. A month later when you come to collect your couch, you find it sitting in their reception area. When you ask why your couch has been supporting anonymous butts in their waiting room for the past month, they throw a service agreement in front of you stating they have access and usage for the agreement period. You’d be furious, if not a little creeped out.

Would you let the company holding your belongings rent it out to other people? Perhaps furnish their own homes? Do we own a couch in the same way we own our personal data? It’s important we start asking these questions before our loss of data ownership becomes legally enshrined in service agreements.

As our personal data becomes more valuable in a digital age, we must start taking the right measures and protecting our data from abuse. New technology brings new regulatory challenges that find themselves in unknown territory. Keeping yourself informed and up-to-date on these emerging issues is the first step in protecting your business or personal data.

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Article by Belinda Darling. Post from: SiteProNews
Head in the Clouds? Computing Out of its Mind