Cloud storage

The general public's often poor understanding of complicated privacy settings and terms and conditions that stretch a mile long in legal gobbledygook means there are many embarrassing incidents where people have believed what they posted or shared was private, to then realise nothing is private as their comment or action goes viral around the world.

I wonder how many people know what it says in the iTunes terms and conditions, or how many people read it, before they click I agree. How many businesses understand the various cloud and storage providers' terms and conditions as we willingly dump our commercial information into their online storage systems?

It's a valid concern.

In August 2012, it was reported that Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple with Steve Jobs, opened up about his concerns, referring to the cloud:

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.

The white elephant in the room needs facing, by companies but importantly by us individually, to take back control of our data and our lives.