Scared of "the Cloud?"

[XubuRoxMySox]

People quit Facebook over privacy issues. People put firewalls up and encrypt stuff because of privacy concerns. Folks add NoScript to Firefox because of it... yet at the same time it seems like "cloud-based" computing is all the rage, and Ubuntu seems to be increasingly "cloudy" especially with Lucid now.

I dunno, "the cloud" kinda scares me. I don't want all that stuff online. I use Abiword/Gnumeric instead of Google Docs and store all my docs on my own HDD, not on Google (talk about privacy issues!).

Am I being paranoid or am I right to be a little leery of cloud computing?

Wha'd'y'think?

Wondering,
Robin

[Dougie187]

Personally I feel you are being paranoid. But it's all preference. I don't think there is anything wrong with you being paranoid. And for all I know you might have good reason for being paranoid. You might have some very sensitive things in your documents that you would prefer not to let out.

Also though, there is probably a lot of information (not maintained by you) that is available on the internet that you wouldn't have put up there, but you can't do anything about it. Either way, it doesn't really matter if you use the cloud or not. It's mainly just supposed to make aspects of your life easier.

The cloud options in Lucid are easy enough to avoid, so if you don't want to use them, just avoid them.

[texpat]

I mostly with you. The "cloud" only has privacy as long as no-one looks for your data - lets face it, there's tera/petabytes up there so as long as you're joe sixpack putting (mostly) inoffensive stuff up, I suppose you're OK. But putting their minds to it, "they" can probably get it. This goes for the random hacker that exploits security holes as much as for government organisations that may subpoena providers into giving them the data.

I avoid putting (too much private) data into the cloud or spaces such as facebook. Anything that could be remotely construed as being compromising I keep to myself, i.e. my local storage.

Having said that, I do use the cloud for storing info because its really convenient. But its non-sensitive stuff, so no big deal if anyone gets hold of it.

[witeshark17]

Agreed with most of the thread. Mostly, I won't use cloud. But if I needed to store something really huge that has no personal issues, maybe I'd consider it.

[murderslastcrow]

I'd rather sync to a USB driver, but I trust Google/Dropbox/Canonical with my files. I back up the most important stuff to external media, so it just makes my contacts and music convenient to share over multiple computers. Nothing too personal, there.