OWNERSHIP & DATA SECURITY IN THE CLOUD

Image: Heather Powazek Champ

Reading an article in the guardian raised a few issues on my mind with the rash of Web3.0 calls that have been flying around the web over the last week.

Web2.0 originally came to attention after the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. That’s quite a while ago in Internet-land, so the idea that Web3.0 is on the near horizon should be taken seriously, as the components necessary are falling into place: Mobile access, WiMax, and Citywide wifi network proliferation, Geotagging, Cloud Computing infrastructure, portable user identities, tagging and emotional nuances are all culminating in the the next step in the connected world.

Cloud Computing is earmarked as the next big thing; netbook popularity has risen from virtually nothing just this year with releases from pretty much all of the major brands of devices that rely on Internet connectivity. Great! But just hold on for one moment before we go for long into a potentially sticky situation. A few points to ponder:

1. Yesterday when I logged into my Facebook account a message came up stating they were having a problem and were onto fixing it. I refreshed the page and, hey presto, there was my homepage; great, problem solved. But what if problem wasn’t solved straight away… what if it was never solved. All the content that exists on my profile lives 100% on the Facebook hard drive and if they lost it there’s nothing I could do about it. Now,I could probably deal with this, though it would be rather annoying to find all my friends online again. But what if the content were a presentation for work, a report full of original IP, what if the Cloud blew away and I was left with nothing but an empty sky?
2. What if my IP lived on a Cloud and they chose to withhold it from me… I’d be powerless to say otherwise. If they said “pay up for this service” I’d have no choice not to. For example, who really owns all the posts on this blog me or WordPress?
3. And thirdly, say I wanted to move to a different Cloud, a Cloud that was cheaper, or one that all my friends were on… would I be allowed to move all my stored data across? Who’s data is it? Mine or theirs?
4. What rights would I have by law? I could maybe demand my data through the police or court systam… but legal jurisdiction only goes so far. What if my data was stored in India or China out of reach? No dice.

While I can see the obvious advantages of Cloud Computing I must say there’s a few ownership and reliability issues that I think ought to get cleared up before too long. Someone ought to be drafting up a global agreement for conduct before this all becomes a bit hard to see through the mist. Your thoughts?

Update: Monday 6th October 2008 – The New York Times published an article over the weekend called Can’t Open You E-Mailbox? Good Luck that addresses some of these same issues.