It seems impossible these days to open a computing magazine or glance at an article without cloud computing coming up. As if making computing atmospheric were not enough, we are offered more “services” and disk space than it took to put a man on the moon, and all of it free!
But is all that computing power and all those free gigabytes of storage really free? As economic theory taught you, “nothing is ever free”, so where is the catch?
Everyone knows that Gmail, that marvellous free email service offered by Google, systematically analyzes the content of the messages exchanged in order to serve you targeted advertising… yukk! Of course, Google draws staggering revenue from advertising, and targeted advertising pays even better.
But what about free file storage and sharing services such as Skydrive, Google Drive, Drop Box, Box, Sugar Sync and Mega? How do they sustain the merciless war these services wage on one another over disk space? Mega, for instance, a file storage service newly launched by the flamboyant Kim DotCom in New Zealand, offers 50 GB free when the market average is around 5 GB.
Yet Mr. DotCom assures us that Mega is a very secure site, one that champions the privacy of its customers. It is true that Mega uses a key generation strategy and cryptographic principles that have the potential to provide a degree of confidentiality for the master keys generated randomly at sign-up, as well as for the secrets and the files that depend on them. But what is the reality?
Although some of these services have had various well-documented security or reliability problems, the least one can say is that they are becoming part of the habits of many of us. Before entrusting our most intimate secrets to one free service or another, however, we should ask ourselves a few questions, or resign ourselves to the consequences.
For example, here are the questions I ask myself before entrusting my digital treasures to any service at all: “Can I live with the impact or the inconvenience…”:
- If the content of the files I upload is analyzed so as to extract data feeding the targeted advertising monster?
- If the content of the files I upload is disclosed to other parties?
- If the files I have uploaded disappear, or their content becomes corrupted?
If you are more than slightly uncomfortable with any of the above possibilities, you have two choices: either you look for a solution that offers sufficient guarantees of confidentiality and robustness, which is quite likely to be found only in a commercial solution, or you accept the consequences, telling yourself that the odds of the worst happening to you are low. It is essentially a classic question of risk tolerance.
Personally, I have no problem entrusting my personal digital documents to reputable free services, but for business data it is quite another matter.
Happy navigating through the cumulonimbus of computing!