“The cloud” isn’t liberal of conservative. It’s memory. I use Dropbox, a cloud service, for things I need to share with others (large files) for us to work on. I also have my family pictures there, as well as several external drives. None of those pics are Kardashian-like. If my house burns down they won’t be lost.
Well said.
You are correct, it is just memory. Yet, just as a weapon is an inanimate object which does not kill on its own, it is the human with access to “it” whom I do not trust.
Direct individualized marketing of the sort which happens after you search for an item in the internet, for example, is annoying yet manageable. It is the large volume of data made up of messages, emails, contacts you have, eBooks you buy, services you support, charities you support, social groups you sympathize with and other seemingly innocuous morsels of information you put in your smartphone/cloud which, when assembled either by humans or algorithms, paint an accurate picture of who you are, without your knowledge or for what purpose, that bothers me.
These cloud providers may claim privacy, yet there are rouge employees (hello Tw33ter & Fakeb00k) who can either leak the info pro bono, sell it in a mercenary fashion or just allow a third party to hack it for political or criminal purposes. I can see a not too distant future when a political candidate will have his/her personal data leaked from the cloud to handicap them during a campaign; oh wait remember the John C. Ryan 2004 race against Barry? Imagine if a totalitarian government (i.e. China) had access to the cloud information of its enemies? What if data clouds existed in Germany in the late 30’s early 40’s? Future conservatives seeking political office better be “clean” as the wind driven snow or have no “negative” electronic footprint.
I think nowadays privacy is underestimated and convenience overrated. Call me paranoid; they can keep their cloud.
Regards.