Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, got a lot of media coverage for saying “I really worry about everything going to the cloud. 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…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.”
I have expressed my fears over this too in many HotViews posts over the years. Let me give you one example.
When my parents died, I ‘inherited’ all their photo albums. Not just their’s but their parent’s and every family photo ever taken. They are a prized possession. Since 1999, all my photography has been digital and all my ‘albums’ have been ‘in the cloud’. We, and every member of my family, look at them often. But what happens when I die? The service only continues if it is paid for. Perhaps that will not be uppermost in my family’s priorities in the months after my death with the high probability that the service will lapse and my albums deleted. Even if they give it priority, many executors find it extremely difficult to take control of cloud-based accounts. Plaxo, Linkedin, Facebook etc make it very hard for people to takeover accounts in those circumstances as one of my friends found recently when his Dad died.
For this reason, I’ve always keep a local copy of everything I have in the cloud – from music, to photos and videos and documents. But I am in an extreme minority. Several years ago, the cloud based service I then used crashed and all my data was wiped. Sure, it should ‘never have happened’ but it did. I only managed to recreate my website because I had a local backup. A similar ‘outage’ in Australia recently meant that many businesses lost their websites and some, which did not have local backups, went to the wall as a result. The ‘unthinkable’ happens!
Wozniak also has fears about ownership of personal cloud data. Last year, a local business used one of my cloud based photos of 'Farnham in the snow' for their Christmas card. I was initially chuffed but then thought 'hold on, that was my property..." Wozniak also cited security breaches with so many hacking incidents.
I am a great advocate of cloud. But I share Wozniak’s fears. Few take my ‘belt and braces’ approach to their personal data. They might well face ‘horrendous’ consequences in the future.