Knowledge is Freedom

Knowledge is freedom. So let me help with that by saying that none of the data you put into “the cloud” is private. Just get used to that idea.

I used to work for a “cloud” service and part of my job required seeing private data. It was mostly banal junk and I learned to ignore it, but it was there for me to inspect if I cared to do so. (This is the converse of a separate lesson I learned once, which is, “You will lose data, you won’t know that you’ve lost it, and even if you did, there’s nothing you can do to get it back.”)

Not only that, but it takes actual people to run a “cloud”. I receive emails regularly recruiting me to do this work, so I can conclude it’s labor-intensive, and my personal experience backs up that conclusion.

And for operations people to be able to perform their work effectively, they need a lot of control over these systems. The biggest systems are built by necessity on failure-prone commodity hardware, and software, that only works because of the scale of the clusters of them.

These individuals have to be free to make autonomous decisions if the teams to which they belong are to achieve their goals. So, guess what? Some dude may decide to shut down service to your office, or read your private documents, or find out your pet’s name. Get used to it and don’t be stupid by trusting any third party service with the data you want to keep private.