My Computer’s Still Personal

One Facebook friend told another (out of my presence, I suppose he thought) that I’m paranoid about The Cloud. Here. Read the exact quote for yourself:

IDs blurred to protect the…ah…insolent. 😉

His opinion versus my opinion — I’ll take mine any day! 😀

And I’ll even throw in this next piece for free:

The Cloud’s My-Mom-Cleaned-My-Room Problem

This is not a short reflection on my childhood neither of my parents was the room-cleaning type but a metaphor for the set of web services we call the cloud. We all know the feeling of logging into Facebook/Tumblr/Twitter/Netflix/Pandora/Gmail and realizing that the interface has changed.

[…you really ought to read the missing guts…]

The personal computing era rose at a time when bandwidth was very constrained. Software ran locally and most individuals’ computers were not hooked up to networks. Your computer *was* personal. And when you got a new one, the first thing most people did was to customize the desktop background. BBS, AOL, and the web began to change all that, but we still thought of our computers as objects distinct from the Internet. You ran software (games, word processors, organizing tools, music players) inside your box without reference to the wider web.

Now, more and more of the computing power we use comes from a CPU across the Internet. We no longer own our digital homes. Instead, we live rent-free with our parents. There are some serious upsides to living with your parents, particularly in today’s economy. You save money. You don’t have to worry about figuring as many things out on your own. Someone else fixes all the messes. And it’s harder to make a a mess when you’re being constantly monitored.

But the freedom of usage that defined personal computing does not extend to the world of parental computing. This isn’t a bug in the way that cloud services work. It is a feature. What we lose in freedom we gain in convenience. Maybe the tradeoff is worth it. Or maybe it’s something that just happened to us, which we’ll regret when we realize the privacy, security, and autonomy we’ve given up to sync our documents and correspondence across computers.

So, no, I don’t Carbonite or Sync or Mozy or GoogleDocs or DropBox or Office 360.

I still believe in privacy and security.

I still believe in personal computers and personal local-box software.

I’m old school. 😯

I don’t live with my parents.

Go ahead. Call me paranoid for that too! 🙄

Someday a tornado is going to come out of that cloud and remind you of me.

PS: I have some Facebook “privacy” news in the hopper for my next post.