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Retreating from the cloud, and writing down appointments in the book, is the wrong solution, globally. The convenience of being able to access the data everywh
by feral 16y ago
Retreating from the cloud, and writing down appointments in the book, is the wrong solution, globally.
The convenience of being able to access the data everywhere is too huge to sacrifice; this is only going to become more important as people check their mail from their ever growing number of devices - smartphone, tablet, home+office PC, to start with.
Instead, we need to make the cloud storage secure.
Encrypted end to end services and protocols, federated encrypted services.
That is, if a sufficient number of users care enough about security to make security a differentiating feature. Previously, the vast majority of users haven't expressed a market preference for more secure services - maybe this will change when as people put more important information (critical business details) into the cloud.
- motters 16y agoPerhaps, but even if your critical business data is encrypted in the cloud the servers will still be keeping access logs which can be handed over for traffic analysis. As far as I'm aware this is what's being asked for in the recent Twitter case.
- mike-cardwell 16y agoMaybe they should keep less logs then, or delete them more frequently, or anonymise those which can be. Or a combination of the three. DuckDuckGo manages to run a search engine without logging IP addresses or user agents...
- motters 16y agoIndeed, but I imagine that from the service providers perspective there is currently probably a far greater incentive to keep the logs due to their commercial value.
- mike-cardwell 16y agoI dunno. I think the majority of companies log for the sake of logging. Some take advantage of this data, but I doubt most do. Instead it just sits there on a drive waiting to be accidentaly leaked, stolen by employees, stolen by hackers or subpoenaed by governments, both good and bad.
- motters 16y agoWell for companies that are even slightly web-savvy the logs are very useful because they contain information about who your customers are, when they use your site, how often, what they're searching for, etc, etc - which can have a real commercial value.
- geekinthecorner 16y agoMany cloud services fail if the data is encrypted. Google gives it's applications away for free because it wants to analyze your content so that it can better advertise to you. There's no benefit to Google keeping your data encrypted so that they cannot further spew more effective ads at you in every possible manner they can think of. That's the trade-off.
- jellicle 16y agoHow exactly do you think cloud services could run with encrypted data? Either the cloud service can decrypt your data (in which case the government can order them to decrypt it for the government), or the cloud service cannot, in which case the cloud service can't do anything useful with your data whatsoever.