Katherine Noyes has a round up of blogosphere responses to Richard Stallman's comments to
The Guardian regarding privacy and "cloud" storage.
Stallman's Cloudburst: Prudence or Paranoia? details responses from Oh-Stallman-is-overreacting-again to "He's absolutely right,". Personally, I think that the bearded, blind squirrel has found a nut.
Google's ChromeOS is the object of Stallman's ire this time. The system minimizes local storage in favor of "cloud" storage. This is OK if you want to access data from multiple machines and
if you pay attention to what you're tossing out into the aether. Putting Granny's oatmeal raisin cookie recipe on "the cloud" is one thing, but your tax records are quite another.
"Cloud" storage is well known to those working in a Windows Server environment; even if they're unaware that it's happening. Do you work in an office where your "My Documents" folder is there no matter which computer you use? It's there because the folder is stored on your company's server, not on the local hard drive the way it is on your home computer. This little, local "cloud" is OK for company data because it's only available in-house. No one from outside the company can see it. (Assuming, of course, no security farts from Redmond!) However, if you've been keeping a diary of what you
really think about your boss in My Documents, that file is probably visible to your boss. Do you see now how "cloud" storage can be bad?