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It's in the US, but that's a fascinating law. Google actually specifies that they cannot disclose the exact location of one's Google Apps data because it is au
by waxman 16y ago
It's in the US, but that's a fascinating law.
Google actually specifies that they cannot disclose the exact location of one's Google Apps data because it is automatically distributed across three different server farms out of several dozen (or more) potential locations. They also are purposefully vague about disclosing the locations of their data farms, in general. Incidentally, one likely reason for this is security.
I agree that there are some genuine privacy and security concerns about the cloud, but I think most criticisms fall into the unforgivable category of "I don't trust it because I can't see it."
And in this sense, academics refusing to accept the cloud are like academics refusing to accept gravity.
- viraptor 16y agoI think it's not a problem of not seeing the data. After all, outsourcing storage and processing is very common now. The real problem is that when you need to see the data, you cannot and you don't know where to find it. For example, you cannot easily swap the email server for a new one and recover everything from backups. Actually, you cannot even reliably make full on-site google apps backups afaik, which is a hard requirement in many places. If you have problems with disappearing data, not only do you have to wait for Google to fix it, but you have a specific priority in their queue. In extreme cases you might want to get a bunch of consultants to deal with the problem on-site right now. No such option if you outsource your storage.