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Saturday, September 3, 2011

Do you know where your data lives?

The UK's Register reports that Apple's forthcoming iCloud service runs on both Amazon's Web Services and Microsoft's Azure cloud service.

This may well be an interim measure for Apple: it isn't spending a billion dollars on its own data center as a lark, after all. It does, however, remind us that you can't always tell who actually has physical access to your information, or to the disks and servers that hold that information.

Suppose that, like certain certificate authorities, some cloud service providers eventually get a bad reputation for preserving data privacy. Can you ever be really sure your data doesn't reside on their systems?

Perhaps you're mindful that we routinely "trust" our common carriers, AT&T, Verizon, et al., not to pry into our communications, and yet we have evidence that at least one of those carriers is unworthy of that trust, having facilitated U.S. government monitoring of Internet traffic. What, then, should we expect from Microsoft, Amazon, and ultimately Apple?

Granted, most of your data isn't confidential, or at least most people won't deem it to be: much of what these services want you to store in the cloud consists of photos, music, and movies. It's worth remembering, though, that once it's in the cloud, you have no control over who might be able to access it.

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