Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

xxi wrote (edited )

I embrace it at a bare minimum and my examples are probably not what most people would associate with so called "cloud computing".

I suppose that I use the"cloud" indirectly in the case of general public code stuff. It's public though so privacy violations seem less important. I try to choose carefully. Meaning that I rather go the free software route and usually there are such alternatives.

A potential privacy issue is having e-mails hosted by a provider other than myself, i.e. having mails hosted on someone else's computer in addition to storing these on my own computer. In my case I use a relatively small privacy aware provider with a long track record of being obnoxious advocates of online privacy and related issues. For example, disobeying government regulations for as long as they can until these has been tested in court, in spite of pressure and threats of hefty fines. When the regulation was legally implemented in practice they just stopped their previous data retention practices making the regulation, in effect, moot. As a consequence they cater to both private and business users of a similar mindset so one could reasonably assume that in case of a betrayal of trust the penalties would be especially severe for my provider.

With that overly verbose (sorry?) account of it all I'd like to say that what @jorgesumle said is accurate. Apart from the above I subscribe to that ideology and practice. If I could I'd host my own mail server but with my current knowledge about self-hosting I'm pretty sure I'd do a pretty shitty insecure job, void of privacy, of it.

As a person that shy away from "clouds" I've always wondered what the fuck people really need it for. Store high resolution pictures they took ages ago but will never lay their eyes on again? To me that seems like the most common use case. Sure, I have important stuff and I keep backups but if I were to lose it all in, say, a fire some photo/config /text file would be the least of my concerns. Of course I'd rather keep it and it'd be inconvenient if I lost it but yeah, I wouldn't contemplate suicide if it were to happen. For most part I'm pretty happy deleting stuff anyway. If I have something laying around for years, like a 5000 word document, the reason is most often that I just don't care that much about it and if I were to do something with it a lot of previous experiences point to that I rather just do something all over again. Picking stuff up, any type of creative work, after a long while is mostly useless because you're usually somewhere else mentally at that point.

1