Does your information actually exist when it’s not being used, viewed or accessed?
It exists only as a magnetic trace on a hard drive on a computer you don’t own, on your thumb drive or your hard drive. But it’s rather like the Zen Koan that states, “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears, does it still make a sound?” Do perception and mind dictate existence?
After complaints both Facebook and Google changed their Terms of Service (TOS) so that you retain rights to your intellectual property. Before you entrust you information to any cloud storage know if they have given themselves the right s to do various and sundry nasty things to your stuff. Do they monitor your usage? Will they enforce copyright infringement for you or against you? When you delete a file do they retain it? What are they going to do about a National Security Letter or a Search Warrant? Read the TOS, understand what you’re reading, don’t just click the “Accept” button.
For Carbonite, unlimited has monthly limits, but they won’t tell you what they are, you get:
Dear Carbonite User,
We regret to inform you that you are in violation of Carbonite’s Terms
of Use –> www.carbonite.com/termsofuse
Your pending backup size exceeds that of our average user by at least a
factor of 10. Your account has been disabled temporarily. You must
either reduced your pending backup size so that it falls below 100GB or
cancel your account. If you have already purchased Carbonite you may
request a full refund. Please let us know how you would like to proceed.
Sincerely,
Carbonite, Inc.
This is what they’re referencing:
YOU WILL BE IN VIOLATION OF THIS POLICY IF, WITHIN ANY MONTH, YOUR USAGE GREATLY EXCEEDS MORE THAN THE AVERAGE LEVEL OF MONTHLY USAGE OF CARBONITE’S PAID SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMERS GENERALLY. FOR PURPOSES OF THIS POLICY, “USAGE” MEANS THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF BANDWIDTH OR STORAGE REQUIREMENTS GENERATED BY BACKING UP YOUR COMPUTER, AS DETERMINED BY US IN OUR SOLE DISCRETION. (I.E., USAGE WITHIN ANY MONTH IN EXCESS OF MORE THAN THE AVERAGE LEVEL OF MONTHLY USAGE OF OUR PAID SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMERS GENERALLY).
Humm… about as clear as mud, and they’ll drop you like a hot rock! It sorta, eh, kinda means that you better not save any massive on-line game files, videos or large numbers of pictures. It looks like the great American novel is safe. But, on the plus side, with 128bit encryption and a password you set they’re not looking at your stuff. So, this might not be the best way to have a full back-up and restore of the home computer. Maybe a USB hard drive and a recovery disc is the way to go on this. There’s an old adage, possession is nine tenths of the law.
With Evernote you hold the copyright, you information may or may not be available, so you don’t actually have control over your stuff. But, for an application that came from MACland it’s not too bad.
So, by and large you “own” your files, meaning that you have an implied copyright for your intellectual property, but you don’t retain “control.” Once it’s in the cloud your legal protections under the 4th Amendment basically disappear. A National Security Letter will get all your Google Searches, YouTube views, Gmails, Google Docs and saved history on your ISP. I like the idea that a judge would have to say, “Yes, you have provided justifiable cause for search; therefore I will sign the warrant.”
Now that your friendly neighborhood Internet Service Provider has some cloud for you to use too, now does that affect your stuff? If you forget to pay your bill, your stuff disappears without a trace. Well, I hope that wasn’t important. Does a “Security Letter” let them see everything in the files? Maybe or maybe not this is entirely new precedent and there is absolutely no way of telling where the courts will come down on all this.
At the end of the day, what do we know? We know that if it is under your physical control and on something you own, you actually own it and control it. We know that we can’t actually own electrons in the current flow, we just rent them. An electric meter just measures flow, they don’t stop or even slow down all that much, but when they do it generates heat and maybe, if the conditions are right, a little light.