CIO — Consultant Bernard Golden has some intense reactions to my recent piece in the New York Times on cloud computing. In it I shared some basic worries—and one advanced worry—to be dealt with. I’ll boil them down a little further here.
The basics: privacy, security, and data portability. When your data is in someone else’s hands, it’s given less protection under the law than if it were on your hard drive. E-mail in Outlook is given more protection from government surveillance than e-mail at Gmail. That’s an unfair tilt in the playing field against cloud enterprises, and the law ought to be fixed.
http://www.cio.com/article/498795/A_Great_Cloud_Debate_Zittrain_Counters_CIO.com_Criticism_
Does an iPhone count as part of the cloud since it fits in your pocket? For these purposes, yes. In a key respect—that of your freedom to control your code and data—these devices act like cloud services.