Tue 03 November 2015 by Christoph Witzany
1. Giants Sell You Out
You might think you have nothing to hide. But this is not true. In the U.S., you are probably committing at least a felony a day and protesting against a nuclear power plant will get you labeled as a terrorist, even if you are an 82-year-old nun.
In Austria, protesting against the sale of fur in a clothing store can land you in jail for several months.
But even if you did nothing wrong, you can end up the target of a federal investigation like this lawyer from Portland or on the no fly list.
In all these cases, the companies that you entrusted with your data must and will turn all information they have on you over to the government. And it is hard to condemn them. The law compels them to cooperate with law enforcement and even where it doesn't, non-compliant executives face retaliation nevertheless.
The data requested by the various agencies are not always used to look for
terrorists. Sometimes the people there just want to
stalk their ex-partners or love interests.
Lesson to learn: Whatever you store on a giant's server can and will be used against you.
2. Giants Spy On You
We already established that the giants help the government to spy on you. But they themselves wouldn't, right? It's their pitch that your data is safe with them, right? Dropbox even claimed that files you upload are inaccessible without your account password. That turned out to be not entirely true.
But who cares that they can look at your data? Why would
they snoop, right? They will not in most cases.
Unless someone sent you information about a leaked Windows 8 image
to your Hotmail account, that is. Then they will read your mail, your instant messages and whatever else in your account that interests them.
Lesson to learn: The giants will spy on you if it serves them.
3. Giants Die
You probably assume that Gmail or Dropbox will be there forever; so did the people using MySpace. But would you bet on the fact that it will be here 5 years from now? The former users of Springpad, Catch, Google Reader, Ubuntu One, Lavabit and Posterous might bet against you.
All these services started with grand goals and became integral to the workflow of many users, yet they all had their Keyser Söze Moment when they were shut down for different reasons.
For a company that gives you something for "free," you are always just a cost center. If they cannot profit from you, or even if they cannot profit enough, your data that you deem safe and sound in their vault lives on borrowed time. Sooner or later you will be shown the door unceremoniously, and only if you are lucky will they let you collect your belongings through a convenient export tool.
Of course, you are a little bit safer if you use a paid service. But examples like Everpix show that there is no guarantee when you pay for a service. Even thousands of paying users could not save the site. And the latest blog post by app.net, despite professing a guarantee to keep the site up "indefinitely," did not convey the jubilant optimism of a thriving project.
Lesson to learn: Only if you have full control over where and how your data is stored will you be able to rest assured that you won't find yourself scrambling to find a new home for your data.
4. Giants Err
While giants are usually swift to throw their immeasurable resources at problems and can usually fix them fast, this is offset by the sheer number of affected users.
And sometimes the solution to a problem is not as effective as the giant would wish or proves to be genuinely unfixable because data has been irreversibly lost. Only 0.2% of users were affected in the Gmail incident. These 0.2%, however, amounted to 150,000 users who had their emails wiped.
Lesson to learn: If giants err, it affects a lot of people, even if for the giant it isn't more than a rounding error.
5. Giants Don't Care
Most people will never have their Google account suspended. Most people also never have their house burglarized. So when Google shuts you out and you have no way to reach a human to reverse the decision, you will probably feel like little Calvin's parents, betrayed and a little hysterical.
Clearly, you should have carefully read the code of conduct for Microsoft's Live account before you uploaded partial human nudity to your SkyDrive account after your beach vacation. Now you got yourself locked out of your emails, pictures, music and your online gaming account because an algorithm thought you were sharing porn. You almost wish it were a human sifting through all your pictures at this point.
Sometimes, however, you will never learn why your account was suspended, like the poor fellow who fell into Yahoo's Kafkaesque rabbit hole and only gained back access to his email account one month and a complaint to the Better Business Bureau later.
Lesson to learn: Don't expect help by humans if a giant's algorithm locks you out of your account.
Conclusion
If this convinced you to take control over your data, in the next post we will present you with some great projects that make it easy for you to be the captain of your data!