[OSX-Users] Re: iCloud

[Steve Harris]

There's another aspect to this argument, that arrives at a similar conclusion:

Google don't make any money from their cloud storage directly, so they have to mine your data in order to cover costs. Apple are only offering iCloud to people that have bought things from them, so they don't /have/ to mine the data, they can regard it as a user lock-in / service enhancement feature.

Of course, that's a long way from a guarantee that Apple won't do something unethical, but they're not required to.

Personally, I'm quite selective about what I'm prepared to commit to 3rd party cloud storage - things like music I don't care about, but commercial email or documents? Absolutely not.

A year or two ago I would have said photos were pretty harmless too, but the availability of cheap face-recgonition tech (c.f. Facebook) makes that a bit questionable.

At least theoretically it's possible to provide cloud storage where the user holds the decryption keys, so the host cannot do any mining - I think that iDisk is believed to work that way but it's very hard to verify, and companies have lied about it in the past. I doubt Apple could do many of the things they're proposing if they encrypted data with a user-held key in iCloud though.

- Steve

On 2011-06-09, at 17:27, Chris Andrews wrote:

> I've already put data on Google's servers. As in Google the world class data miners. Am I worried about putting data on Apple's servers? Not really.
> 
> Chris
> 
> On 9 Jun 2011, at 15:44, mc schraefel <mc at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
>> so, putting one's data in the cloud
>> 
>> - one's personal data into a company's fileshare, with security back doors,
>> rather than one's own backups where one holds the keys to the encryption
>> 
>> am i the only person feeling a little dubious about the price of all this
>> convenience?
>> or the assumption that one is always on? will always be on? 
>> 
>> it's an amazing techno shift = has there been much discussion about this
>> transition?
>> 
>> apparently apple's stock of timecapsules has gotten very parched. with
>> iCloud, why would they refresh that? 
>> 
>> i have a feeling of foreboding.
>> 
>> anyone??
>> 
>> mc
>