Two articles related to cloud security caught my attention the past few days.
The first, "Here's How Much People Trust Facebook", showed poll results of 1,000 people regarding their trust in Facebook. 28% said not at all, 34% said not very much, 32% said somewhat and 3% said a lot. The article had a chart about information that adults consider to be the most sensitive and said that much of the content on Facebook lines up with this, including phone conversations, text messages and their location.
What struck me is not that most people don't trust Facebook, it was that the sensitive info mentioned is entrusted to carriers, who offer personal clouds as a repository of people's digital lives. If the vast majority of people don't trust Facebook (and Facebook owns Instagram), and if those people use a smartphone (who doesn't) and they are implicitly trusting carriers with their sensitive data (in large part because people pay for mobile service and they know carriers are regulated to protect privacy), what does this imply about which cloud people should trust with their digital lives?
The second article, "Exclusive: Big data breaches found at major email services - expert", said that 272 million email credentials were recently stolen and being sold by a Russian hacker known as the 'collector', and this included tens of millions of accounts from Yahoo!, Gmail and Microsoft. Aside from prompting me to change my passwords, this made me wonder about the safety of personal info in these services. As the article said, hackers know that most people reuse the same password with multiple services, so if they get access to one, they can access others. The conclusion is that personal info in these services can be highly vulnerable.
This makes one think about what is the best cloud for one's digital life, where it will be the safest for the longest time. Facebook isn't trusted, and the large email providers, who provide personal clouds (Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive), are targets. Is this to say that operator clouds are not likely to be breached and they are more secure? Time will tell. When it comes to deciding which cloud to trust with people's sensitive data, the vast majority already trust their carrier, therefore, it makes sense to trust them with their digital lives - just sayin'.
