A year of escaping cloud computing
Over the past twelve months I’ve found computing habits subtly changing to shift further and further away from cloud services. While I’ve always been aware of the issues involved in losing control of data, it didn’t concern me until about a year ago when I heard of Amazon deleting all the books from a person’s Kindle then leaving them with no recourse.
I took a look at my digital life, and what I could lose at the whim of a company I had no control over. Many of my photos, music and documents were stored away in data centres not on my machines. In short, my digital life wasn’t mine, it was controlled by someone else. I didn’t suddenly switch everything away from cloud computing, but began to move my digital possessions back to my control bit by bit.
The first step was simply to make sure I always kept backups of my cloud data. I kept using Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Player and all the rest for convenience, but everything was duplicated on a hard drive at home so I couldn’t be cut off from my data.
Then Edward Snowden revealed the extent of government spying on the internet, and cloud providers complicity in this. At that point I decided to set up OwnCloud to manage my own cloud services. For the barely-significant sum of £2.40 per month, I rent a virtual server which backs up my data, shares photos with friends and family, streams my music, even provides me with a HTML-based coding environment for when I’m on the move. It’s true that I’m still relying on a company’s servers and they could shut me off, but because I manage the system, I’d just need to switch to another server and I’d be up and running again.
The biggest change I made on my desktop was to switch back to Firefox from Chromium. This wasn’t a technical decision, but a philosophical one. I felt more closely aligned with the Mozilla team’s principals that Google’s.
Finally, a few weeks ago I switched from Android to Cyanogenmod on my tablet. Again, I felt uncomfortable with the level of information the company was amassing about me. I don’t actually dislike Google, but I think it’s important to understand that they’re not a benign entity offering services for the good of humanity. They’re a massive advertising company looking to turn your personal information into dollars. I still use their services when I think that the trade off is a good one (for example, Google Docs is a great way to edit documents on multiple devices), I just don’t hand over all my information any more.
There are still a few things left to do. I’m currently considering hosting my own e-mail and switching off a closed source messaging system (whatsapp). However, it feels good to have come as far as I have in reclaiming my digital life.
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About The Author
Ben Everard
Ben Everard is the co-author of Learning Python with the Raspberry Pi and hacks hardware projects held together with a big dollop of Linux and Free Software glue. He's @ben_everard on Twitter.
I understand this viewpoint but for myself I don't find the trade-off of keeping my own systems worth the effort.
G-mail allows me to view a lot of attachments in place. It allows me to connect easily with multiple devices and everything is always in sync. It also allows me to keep years worth of exchanges and search them easily. That has been very handy on numerous occasions.
And in the end what Google learns about me is not much. They know my friends and I still make fun of each other like middle school students. They know what kind of printer my sister has and that she'd like me to find another toner cartridge for it. They know my political and religious leanings but I don't care and I'm sure they don't either. They know I wanted a pickle recipe from my brother in law and what time I'm supposed to arrive for dinner at a friend's house. I'm OK with them having that information.
The ownership of digital content things is another matter. The truth is almost no ownership rights are transferred when you purchase digital material from almost anyone. Even though they have done away with DRM in many instances I'm sure you'd still find the actual fine print gives you no more than usage rights. For instance good luck trying to resell those things and not breaking a law. That's a problem but it isn't one I can solve really no matter where the data is kept. It's true account hassles can happen and you can lose stuff. But you can also have a fire or theft and lose real things. These occurrences are probably all highly unlikely though at the end of the day.
It's true Google is a company with profit at its general heart. In general though I like the way they go about things and am fine using their products. I do use Firefox anyway because I like the mouse gesture extension I use.
As far as hiding from anyone spying by not using a large company I think you are mostly fooling yourself there. Your data is not on their servers perhaps – disregarding the virtual server you are using. But all your data still traverses your ISP and the internets generally. The pipes has ears. That's a safe assumption at this point I think.
Maybe I'm just lazy. I try not to beat myself up for it though. It's just me.
The RSS feed had a "by Ben Everard" associated with this post but the actual post here on the site has no byline at all that I'm seeing. Also no date (a huge pet peeve personally).
Also I think you dropped a "no" from the first sentence of the second paragraph.
The author and date information is shown with the posts on the front page. It is a bit strange that they're not shown in standalone views, though — I agree. I'll play with the theme and see what I can do.
"The biggest change I made on my desktop was to switch back to Firefox from Chromium. This wasn’t a technical decision, but a philosophical one. I felt more closely aligned with the Mozilla team’s principals that Google’s"
I've been thinking this for a while and your statement has re-ignited my resolve to give it a go. Unfortunately, with five of us in the household, I may get some resistance, but I'll give it a go…
I am venturing down the same road, Chrome has been uninstalled from my home and work PC’s since Mr Snowden made himself known. I have made use of Box, Dropbox and Skydrive and it is difficult to cut the cord, but the privacy issue will lead me to do so. I still use Google for Calendar and Contacts at the moment as it is so convenient to sync between devices, but having just set up Ownlcoud may mean I can ditch them too.
A fantastic post Ben. I have been going through a similar change over the last year which has culminated in me removing all Apple hardware from my life and replacing it with a Samsung Galaxy SII and a zareason Alto 4335 Laptop. Having made the switch from proprietry software full time I must say I am pleasently surprised how painless it has been!
Leaving services as software (and hardware) substitutes behind is a slower, more painful process though. I've ditched facebook although I never really liked it, but Skype and WhatsApp are much more difficult propositions. This is mainly due to contact with family and friends living abroad.
Keeping all my media stored on disks I personally own is a must for me. I don't think I can trust a virtual server owned by any company. I would be interested to know if you considered running your own physical server?
For the first time I am happy that the prohibitively expensive cost of (really slow) internet in Zimbabwe has kept me off the cloud. All of my media is stored on physical storage, and although I do use facebook and several email providers very little information actually ends up on the internet. If I ever do need cloudiness in my life I will probably set up a physical server, but at the moment I am happy living most of my life in “offline” mode…
I also never understand why i should use cloud services. In times Each mobile phone has more than 16 GB storage i have no problems in taking all my important data with me. By doing this i never have problems with lost or slow internet connections.
With this insight i also realized the importance of data interopability standards like dlna, upnp, caldav, carddav, imap,…
You can have your data everywhere with you. No, not in this foggy cloud. Its all in your pocket!
As Leomar said, I've never had an issue with portable storage.
Both my phone and my tablet are only half full.
I keep it upto date as well as pushing back updates to my home server by use of rsync over ssh.
Personally I have not adopted cloud services, I don't want my data spread around the world and like others here use rsync to my home NAS. However the company I work for is going for cloud strategically for SAAS and PAAS and it does make economic sense especially for Dev and QA environments that one can spin up and down as required and pay accordingly for use and licenses rather than the permanent cost of data centre hosting.
Nice article Ben. I've shared your concerns for many years. You got me looking into setting up OwnCloud already.