Re: [Staffslug] What Do You Think?
On 20/10/10 11:40, Peter Cannon wrote:
We have no control over our data we think we have but we don't,
every time you send an email Cheltenham can grab it out the air
if they want and don't kid yourself with "Ah I send mine
encrypted" MI5 + 6 eat encryption for breakfast, every time
you download an Android app your ISP/Phone provider knows what
you are doing and where you are doing it from the list
is endless. Banks, insurer's in fact anything you've ever
applied for will be available to someone somewhere.
While the government (and other organisations) certainly have access to
a lot of our data, that doesn't mean they necessarily control all of it.
With a cloud based system the operator has total control, with the
ability to add, remove or change anything as they see fit.
For example, you may remember last year Amazon remotely deleted copies
of 1984 from users' Kindles, supposedly because they didn't have the
rights to sell it in the first place. Also, Sony recently remotely
removed the "run other OS" feature from PlayStation 3s, which they
claimed was a measure to counter copyright infringement.
If all your data was in the cloud, this sort of thing would be a lot
easier to do and I think that it would be very tempting for
organisations to use it as a way of controlling "troublesome"
information. Worse, with no local storage, how would you prove anything
had actually been changed?
Coincidentally, there was a discussion along these very lines at the
Birmingham Unconference last Saturday.