The Cloud, The Proud

Since the stir about Apple’s invasive and hypocritical promotion of personal privacy, these stories about scanning cloud data for material which is deemed inappropriate, keep popping up. More and more users start to wonder: what exactly is happening to all my images, emails, pdfs, search traffic, etc. That’s a good thing. The pervasive sense that “I have nothing to hide, who cares.” serves these services well and persists.

It’s not coincidental that the options for keeping your data off of Microsoft, Google, Apple or Amazon’s public cloud servers are almost non-existant and any solution you find is complicated to set-up. But still… What options do you have if you don’t like the idea of backing up your data to Apple, Microsoft, Google or Amazon? One option would be to build your own private cloud server. It’s relatively complicated and expensive though over time and considering you probably pay multiple providers, it’s not as expensive as it may appear. Another is to use a hybrid approach, and keep your data locally, use these services at a minimum – maybe only the free limited data plans – and store your archives on a hard drive in the top drawer.

Remember when local storage was the only option? And who knows one day the internet might just not be available.

The article that got me thinking again about this is here.