Posted on 01/25/2009 5:04:15 PM PST by Gordon Greene
Google is to launch a service that would enable users to access their personal computer from any internet connection, according to industry reports. But campaigners warn that it would give the online behemoth unprecedented control over individuals' personal data.
The Google Drive, or "GDrive", could kill off the desktop computer, which relies on a powerful hard drive. Instead a user's personal files and operating system could be stored on Google's own servers and accessed via the internet......
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Google is to launch a service that would enable Google to access users’ personal computer from any internet connection.
[Do we really want somebody in the Government’s back pocket storing all our personal data? ]
Microsoft already tried some of this with Passport and it sank like a rock.
Right, right. They want you to store all your data on Google. They want you to watch all of your movies and TV on the internet too. The ISP’s want to charge you for bandwidth usage... Let’s see, give up all privacy, allow the government free range to your data. Pay extra every month to do it while your every move is tracked. Sounds super!
Sounds good, but I don't trust anyone whose website has plenty of info on how to donate to them, while having little to no information on what exactly the thing is, how it works, why you need it and how to run it.
What is this, the fifty billionth resurrection of the “network computer”??? It didn’t fly in any of the other iterations, and I doubt that attaching Google’s name to it will make it any more popular this time around.
This is indeed a stupid move on googles part..... I no more give up using my computer just because I don’t have internet access etc for whatever reason. Entertainment, word processing , photo’s, reading ebooks, watching movies, listening to tunes. Internet is about 20% of my actual PC use.
If google thinks they can replace that and have me rely on “ONE” such a connection for all my media they have gone from google to gaggle.....
The biggest threats to the personal data of ordinary people (as opposed say to the designs for nuclear bombs) are:
For one thing, those living in smaller towns or with trusted neighbors can store more wealth at home. The would be thieves half a world away will never know and never come visiting to find out that you've got some gold buried in the backyard. But on the Internet, we are all in everyone's backyard. The KGB Mafia in Moscow has just as good access to the network side of the PC sitting in front of me right now as do I. We all need to learn to lock our data down just as if we lived in the bad part of town, across from the meth labs and crack dens and thieves of every description.
For another thing, unlike physical gold, guns and cash, data can be encrypted, so that one can safely store ones most valued secrets on the most insecure site. Let me elaborate on what that means ...
On the gold bug sites I frequent, a common recommendation is to store ones gold in a safe deposit box, rather than at home. If anyone ever suspected you had much gold at home, you risk being robbed, perhaps killed. This recommendation is countered with the obvious warnings, stories and history of the government taking gold from safe deposit boxes.
Here's the twist: imagine you could store your gold in a bank safe deposit box, but first put a lock on it, so that not even the CIA or IRS or FBI could get at it. Then you'd have a pretty secure setup for your gold, so long as you trusted that lock company.
We can do that with our data. In fact we can do it now. In fact, that's what I've been doing for several years now. My most critical personal data, such as access codes and account information for all my money (what itsy bitsy little bit there is of it;) is actually stored on several public servers. At various times, it has been on Yahoo, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other less well known public web servers.
I encrypt it first, using some open source software (mostly the Mozilla Thunderbird email client with GNU encryption). I trust that encryption software. I may or may not trust those web servers; those web servers may or may not stay in business; one or more of them may be down at any given time; I may or may not backup my personal computers. But even if a natural disaster takes out all of North Texas, if I manage to crawl out of here alive, I'll be able to get my data back.
Obviously, the particular methods I use are way too geeky for ordinary people
But the underlying architecture is just about right. Most people are far less able to ensure the safety of their data from loss or theft than those running the big servers. Most people have real lives to live, outside of being computer security and reliability geeks.
Just so long as you can trust the encryption/decryption piece running locally on your computers and handhelds, then the real threats that compromise most data are as a practical matter going to be better dealt with on managed servers.
I can manage to keep a robust, reliable, and secure local computer running. But I watch most of my family, who aren't computer geeks, and see that they are essentially unable to accomplish this.
The key to security for most data will require, as part of the solution, that we reduce the complexity and eliminate the inscrutable error messages and failure modes that we currently impose on end users. Good security and availability of data can not be provided using local storage on computers that are too complicated and failure prone to be understood by those responsible for managing them.
isn’t that wha’ microsoft calls cloud computing?
and why microsoft wanted yahoo?
OK I remember this idea being a crashing failure when it cropped up in the 90s. At the time hard drives cost serious money. Last week I saw a 1 Terabyte external drive for $178.
The amount of data stored on shared servers, and the proportion of data overall stored there, behind various network applications, continues to climb inexorably.
Younger users especially spend less and less time worrying about where their data is physically stored, and more time using and accessing it from a variety of places.
The last place I'd want any personal data is flying around on the web. It's bad enough that credit card data is out there (and obviously occasionally vulnerable).
Kinda reminds me of the day when everyone in the office had a VT100 on their desk.
What people seek and will optimize for is the convenient, safe and reliable access to information, both their private information and public information.
How often have we heard stories of major data security compromises, of thousands or millions of medical or credit or banking records, by the theft of a laptop?!
If you don't know how to secure data on a laptop (and it's not all that easy these days) then carrying around your data that way is like carrying that data around with a big "Steal Me" sign on it.
Wasn’t this called a dumb terminal before PC’s?
At the risk of overusing the phrase, it seems to me that there's a shark about to be jumped.
They attempt to steal it at their own peril. I've got a .45 caliber security system that google can't match.
And frankly, the data that I have on the laptop isn't all that significant. Anything of significance is encrypted, and there's precious little of that.
Boy, I would love to agree with you. I can’t argue with the practicality of anything you said, but I also can’t trust GOOGLE/Government to store my personal data. That’s not to say they couldn’t get into my PC through the internet, but I can at least pull the cable on that if necessary.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2171191/posts
This article has to be taken into consideration when giving GOOGLE power over all of that data. If you still decide to put it out there, then let the buyer beware.
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