The tyranny of the cloud
Think twice before you hit “upload”
“The cloud” is one of my least favorite internet neologisms. It suggests something fluffy, white and weightless: a global atmosphere within which our email, social network profiles, images and shared files innocently drift. All of which sounds delightful — but the reality is that every cloud is composed of a vast infrastructure of bunker-like rooms, filled with rack upon rack of servers. And the moment you decide to upload something into this global data warehouse — be it photos of your family or precious documents — you give up many of your rights to ownership.
A year ago, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak added his voice to the chorus of those alarmed by the implications of the cloud. “I think it’s going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be horrible problems in the next five years,” he opined on a trip to Washington. “With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away… the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it.”
Such warnings have a distinguished pedigree — and an equally impressive history of being ignored. Back in 2008, the founder of the Free Software Foundation Richard Stallman called the adoption of cloud-based systems “worse than stupidity… a marketing hype campaign.” So why is the world quite so willing to leap into the arms of these services if they are so dangerous; and are the dire warnings actually likely to come true?
Why is the world so willing to leap into the arms of these services?
The overwhelming answer to the first of these questions is convenience: both for users and for companies.
Having email, images, files, profiles, information and so on available wherever you go is a massive boon — and one that many users don’t associate with the idea of clouds in the first place. If you’re using any online email service, from Gmail to Outlook or Yahoo, your data is being held on the servers of the company providing that service. If you’re reading a book on a Kindle, uploading any image or comment to any site you’ve signed into, tweeting or “liking” or sharing or voting or rating, you too are floating in the cloud. You just don’t know it — and that suits the people running these services just fine.
For, so far as corporations are concerned, maximising this convenience is a perfect tool for recruiting users — and for gaining their precious data, the leveraging and selling of which provides the bulk of revenues for everyone from Facebook to Google.
The bargain you strike by signing up to many services can easily be broken, however. Consider the millions of legitimate users affected when file-sharing site Megaupload was shut down by the US government in 2012 — at which point all the information in its cloud, whether pirated or not, instantly vanished from the internet. Or, this year, the Canadian company Kobo’s sudden decision to remove all self-published books from its e-books service, something to which a typical self-published author’s reaction was “I can’t believe they have the right to do this.”
“With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away…”
Rights — and content creators’ lack of them — lie at the heart of cloud storage’s worst dangers, something connected in turn to the underlying nature of cloud storage. In the words of reporter Douglas Heaven, writing in New Scientist, “a digital file exists as a state of matter… rather than matter itself.”
Your information is not a possession in any straightforward legal sense. It’s merely the electrical state of a disk owned by somebody else; or, more likely, the state of a large number of different disks scattered across the world, each containing part or all of what may be numerous copies of your information, backed up and accessed and reproduced as necessary to ensure server-side efficiency.
The moment you hit upload, you may have given away almost every right you might expect to possess over what’s “yours”. Instead, the entitlements and obligations you’re left with will be spelled out in the terms of an almost-certainly-unread licensing agreement with the company who own a service — and who, in many cases, will award themselves the ability to do pretty much anything legal they see fit with your material.
Not all clouds are created equal, of course, and some offer far more impressive services than others. Even then, though, not physically possessing your data can bring problems. Depending on the country a company’s servers are located in, for example, a government will also reserve certain privileges regarding your information: looking inside your old emails without a warrant, in the case of America; or locking you up for insulting the monarch in Thailand.
(And that’s before you get onto the perils of hacking, security breaches, system failures, and the other everyday vulnerabilities that come with trusting other people to safeguard your stuff.)
So is there an alternative to life in the cloud? Julian Ranger, chairman and founder of the young tech company SocialSafe, believes there could be. SocialSafe is a company founded on the belief that the dire warnings about cloud technologies really are true. In Ranger’s words, “lack of privacy through inadvertent self-harm (over-sharing) and through third-party data aggregation will cause greater and greater harm over the years as people cannot leave their past behind them” — and that’s before you get onto data loss, theft, fraud, and the wholesale shutting down of online services.
…while even fools are wise after the event, it can be extraordinarily difficult to be wise in advance.
The service SocialSafe currently offers is the automatic copying of all your cloud content to your own computer — to be held by you no matter what happens online, and browsed or analysed at your own convenience. Currently, for a subscription of £5 per year, it covers the gamut of social media, from Twitter to Facebook via Instagram and LinkedIn. But by the end of next year, it plans to cover categories of data ranging from purchase histories and utility bills to financial and health data — and, Ranger hopes, towards an eventual model where you yourself own your personal data library, and can “decide to make [it] available in parts you decide for purposes you agree with.”
Meanwhile, legal thinking on digital rights is slowly catching up with the absurdity of their being almost no current recourse for loss, deletion or the whims of a service provider; but its pace is massively exceeded by the rate at which material is flowing online, into the hands of businesses whose profitability rests on owning (and exploiting) everything you give them.
Companies like SocialSafe (and there are plenty of others springing up) are intriguing, in this context, thanks to their insistence that precisely the opposite should be true: personal data should be something you control, on a computer that’s in your possession — and companies wishing to offer their services should come to you seeking access.
Put like this, it seems astonishing that such privacy isn’t our present default; or that more users aren’t campaigning for the right to make it so. But while even fools are wise after the event, it can be extraordinarily difficult to be wise in advance. After all, who could object to a fluffy, drifting cloud?
A version of this piece first appeared as Tom’s fortnightly Life:Connected column for BBC Future
