Wozniak: “I really worry about everything going to the cloud”
Don’t count Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak among the fans of the shift to cloud computing, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Wozniak made a special appearance after a Washington performance of Mike Daisey’s “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” a controversial monologue on the conditions of Apple’s factories and labor practices in China, to answer audience questions. And while the AFP reports that Woz held court on topics ranging from Foxconn itself (he praised Apple’s oversight of its factories and says he expects conditions to improve over time), his experiences as a public school teacher, and his appearance on Dancing With The Stars.
But for likely the first time, Wozniak used his soapbox to express his concern with the future of computing, as far as the cloud, given the still-lingering issues over content ownership,
Quoth the Woz, as per the AFP report:
“I really worry about everything going to the cloud. I think it’s going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years. With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away. I want to feel that I own things. A lot of people feel, ‘Oh, everything is really on my computer,’ but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it.”
This is a common complaint with the cloud, especially on the individual user level. Consumers are (rightfully) made nervous by lengthy, often-draconian user agreements that call into question the ownership and control over uploaded data. Moreover, Dropbox’s issues with security and LinkedIn’s password hacks don’t inspire huge levels of confidence, either.
Either by coincidence or design, today also saw Gizmodo publish an editorial from Wozniak entitled “Why the Cloud Sucks,” in which he describes an incident where a software conflict between Google Calendar, Apple OS X and a third-party tool caused some of his personal data to vanish from existence, and how he expects this kind of thing to get worse before it gets better.
But interestingly, he places the onus on the cloud service provider to develop and provide some kind of mechanism to preserve and allow for the recovery of data (storage services like Box, Dropbox and Google Drive all offer file versioning, it should be noted), whether it was lost by user negligence or a spike in the software.
To that end, Wozniak calls for governmental regulation over the cloud market:
“It does suggest a responsibility of service providers to recover from such events, whether caused maliciously or accidentally, or by bad software. Our ‘freedoms’ come from regulation. The Bill of Rights reads ‘[some party] shalt not [do bad things]’. Regulation is the only way we’ll own a bit of what we trust to the cloud.”
Wozniak is a smart guy, and he’s definitely somebody to listen to when he airs his concerns about the cloud. Moreover, while he definitely seems coming at this from the angle of the consumer and sysadmin, the questions of ownership he raises are critical to the conversation over public vs. private/hybrid clouds. In fact, it’s a similar debate to the one we go over every time Amazon Web Services has an outage. And projects like OpenStack exist to help ensure a future where cloud data is portable and removable.
But what Wozniak is suggesting goes a little further, suggesting that our cloud-stored data is so important that it needs a legal guarantee of protection and insurance should worst come to worst, going a step past the service level agreement (SLA) that most cloud service providers offer into the realm of legal recourse. It’s a strong stance, and not one that’s not surprising from the co-inventor of the personal computer, which is, after all, the ultimate expression of owning your own data. Whether or not anybody with a position to do so takes heed is a different matter.
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