Yeah, but your data is the only reason why you are valuable to you provider of free or cheap cloud based services. If they can't use it (even anonymized), they

Yeah, but your data is the only reason why you are valuable to you provider of free or cheap cloud based services. If they can't use it (even anonymized), they will have no incentive to provide free/cheap stuff to you :) Imagine the outrage if Google charged all people for Gmail in today's "free everything" world. (...it would be interesting though if someone figured out a way for the server to only store data without possibility to tie it to a particular identity, so they could still do aggregate queries on it. dunno if it's possible though while still not alowing the client to access data he's not allowed to see. and I bet someone could figure out a way to identify which of the non-client-encrypted-but-anonymized-through-such-a-method data you access from the server is actually yours via some patter recognition...)