It would be a lot of fun to have the definitive dialogue on Cloud computing on XS....

I am thinking about some points in time relative to the privacy and security problem. My attempt to articulate the privacy problem...

A. Security of data warehoused on someone elses drive.
B. Corporate monitoring of data; both the cloud service provider and those who they may share it with.
C. Hacking of cloud service providers and the data services they provide.

The future state proposed by Inez (I am not Inez, for the record):

A. Personal data needs to be stored on a personal client device.
B. Only community data is online; interaction between cleints occurs in the cloud and may be vulnerable to monitoring.
C. A very powerful force will be needed to actively counteract attempts to hack the cloud, monitor the network, and to corrupt the client.

The today and near future state:

A. A lot of our data or the data we seek (to download) is online; online drives are coming and social network sites are coming to store a healthy portion of our personal life. Hence we can be watched by corporations as we obtain the data, and the data already online is a password away from being fully available to hackers.
B. We are vulnerable to both corporate monitoring of online and downloadable content
C. Clients are nearly trivial to hack. The only path to being relatively safe is running the entire PC experience in a virtual machine.


The Cloud state:
A. Most data online; passwords and devices become data gateways potentially availing a hacker of a boatload of user data.
B. More data online; more potential for corporate monitoring but corporate visibility may enable effective user dissent for overly invasive policies.
C. I actually believe my client is more vulnerable than Google. Certainly true of the average, relatively unsecure client. Clouds may be more secure than today's clients.

Choose wisely.