Comments on: Who Exactly Owns Your Data in the Cloud?

By: Ackbar

Ackbar — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 17:04:06 +0000

ITS A TRAP!!

By: Jerry Fahrni » “What’d I miss?” – Week of January 17th

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 17:44:03 +0000

[...] GIGAOM: “Who Exactly Owns Your Data in the Cloud? – Between Gmail, Google Docs, Zoho, Facebook, [...]

By: Sarthak

Sarthak — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:17:05 +0000

Google Docs, owns my data!

Safari 5 at http://www.theapplegoogle.com

By: Leslie Grandy

Leslie Grandy — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:30:17 +0000

I’ve written about this exact topic on two occasions for Technorati. There are a number of core issues underlying this topic as you point out. Before you can begin protecting your data, you actually need to understand who has it and who they think owns it, so you can then protect it. I recently had a personal experience with Sprint, where their customer record had my legal data and Sprint believed the owner was their customer whose data they were protecting and since I was not their customer they were challenged to expunge it from that record. http://gearheadgal.net/home/2009/12/19/sprint-we-protect-our-customers-data-you-are-just-a-consumer.html

We handshake our way around and across the web so fluidly today, we don’t even realize when we have given permission to share it, let alone who perhaps is operating under the (mis)impression they may own something we actually think we control. http://technorati.com/technology/article/whos-protecting-my-information-in-the/

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:06:52 +0000

Interesting issues. Whatever you put in a rented apartment is your exclusive property for as long as you pay the rent (and for some locally-defined grace period afterward). If the landlord goes bankrupt, it's still your property. So far, we have a good precedent for regulating cloud data.

But if you abandon an apartment, after some time the landlord may sell your belongings to compensate him for storage, cleaning, unpaid rent, etc. Given differences between storage costs in the real and virtual worlds, and different implications for selling a couch or selling personal data, we'd probably want to require that unclaimed data is erased, or put on non-volatile memory and stored (a cheap security deposit could fund the latter).

Questions over access should be solvable with real-world precedents (if you loan your keys to someone, there should be an understanding about whether they have the right to make and distribute copies...), and it shouldn't be that hard to require simple disclosures and opt-in conditions for what companies are allowed to do with your data.

How you prevent unexpected combinations of data - no idea.

The Economist quoted some data expert a few months back as saying that personal information is like plutonium pellets: “Kept in secure containers, handled as seldom as possible and escorted whenever it has to travel. Should it get out into the environment, it will be a danger for years to come. Putting it into one huge pile is really asking for trouble.”