A couple of reasons. Firstly unlike Firefox and Safari and of course the corporate supported IE, it doesn’t seem to get past the companies proxy server.  Second, and most importantly to me I’m not prepared to give Google any more information about myself.

 Don’t get my wrong, I’m a happy user of 3 Google services - mail, reader and analytics . But that’s about all i want Google to know about me. Read Write Web has a good history and synopsis of Google’s privacy  stance. To me, reading that I get uneasy… real uneasy.  Ben Kepes and I have debated this before, I can summarise his position as more trusting than mine. Simple as that.

 I know that Google has a stated position of “do no evil”. I also know what happens in companies when they get squeeze for revenue and profit. Not always the right things.  Reason number 1.

 Another way to think about this. Google is a company of nearly 20 000 people, they’re like a small city in terms of population. And even small cities have bad people.  In the US 1 in every 136 people have been caught and convicted of a crime, if you extrapolate that out it means you would expect a company the size of Google to have 147 bad people.  147 people who could mis-use all that data that they now have the potential to access.

 End of the day its your choice, but you should be aware of the privacy issues associated with cloud services.

PS I’ve dropped Firefox and moved to Safari as my browser of choice. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Comments (4)

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written by Paul, September 17, 2008

Agree that privacy (or lack thereof) on the web is a personal choice - so it doesn't help if any side of the debate tries to over-hype or over-scare-monger.

Your link to the Read-Write article has an update that points to the fact Google removed some of its TOS text to not apply to Chrome - and has said repeatedly that they are not interested in owning/sharing user data.

Comparing Goog employees as a group to the average American city/town is a farce. There is obviously a massively different selection criteria between the two groups rendering any comparison meaningless.

The NBR article you linked to is typical web 'sound-bite' journalism with almost no serious debate or understanding of the issues with cloud computing.

Bottom line is you're suspicious of cloud computing and that is fine. But try and be a bit more balanced about it.

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written by Paul, September 17, 2008

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the comment. I admit to being a bit taken aback by your challenge around balance. I can see your point, however isn't the fact that i'm saying everything Google (or Apple with their iPhone) does isn't great applying balance? Maybe i'm just being contrarian... perhaps.

I'm actually a big fan of cloud computing. But because of my background in security i am very conscious of what people can get away with on the 'net... perhaps overly. My point is ...just think about this stuff when you sign up.

Hope to hear from you again.

Paul

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written by Paul, September 18, 2008

Hi Paul, maybe balance was the wrong word. I'm interested in what the real risks are for my personal data stored at these companies - I just can't find any good information about what those risks are.

There are bad people all over the place - if my biggest risk (as you say) is a bad person at Google stealing what they can about me, well, then isn't that a similar risk to someone breaking into my house and stealing my stuff? Should I worry about it as much or less than walking down a street and getting mugged?

Is all my data getting lost in a massive cloud computing disaster (such as a fire at a data center) a greater or lesser chance than the same thing happening to my business location and my own servers?

Is someone hacking the cloud and stealing my info the same or less risk than an employee doing the same to me, or someone targeting me individually and getting on my network?

We live with risk all the time. Is cloud computing a greater risk than these others? Is it less? I really don't know, but that's the kind of informed argument I think we need.

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written by Paul, September 18, 2008

Hi Paul,

"Is cloud computing a greater risk than these others?"

This is the crux of the matter. I don't know if anyone has ever done a comparison ...

On-prem down time vs Cloud
on-prem curruption vs clound instances etc

Might get hold of Ben (he's got bigger reach than me) to poll the community.

Solid points

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