Project 3 Reflection

The main tradeoff in using the cloud is trading convenience for privacy. You get the convenience of not needing to worry about owning storage, thus having no storage limit on your data. This is very nice for small businesses that cannot afford their own data storage hardware, or even for the regular person who needs a place to store all their pictures videos and such. Personally, I use the cloud in two capacities. One is iCloud, which I use to backup all my phone data. This is incredibly useful as I don’t need to worry about losing anything if my phone were to break. In addition, it facilitates an easy transition to a new phone, should I get a new phone. The other primary way I use the cloud is storing pictures and videos on Google Drive. I find this very useful because not only does it free up space on my computer, it also allows me to access the content from any device as I can just login to my Google account and view. While all these advantages are great and very useful, I have had doubts as to whether I should be using them. Do I really value convenience over privacy? I lead a thoroughly uneventful life, so none of my data is very interesting or important so I would not be worried about someone being able to wreak havoc by getting access to my data. At the same time though, I do really want my data to stay private. I don’t like the idea of people looking at my data without me knowing or giving permission.

I had never given much thought to private cloud services until this project, but I am growing to like the idea more and more. Once set up, the services could be just as convenient as the cloud services, yet not sacrifice my privacy. For this project we setup Embry, which allows you to upload media and then access that media remotely from synced devices. This would be a good replacement for my use of Google Drive to save pictures and videos as I could save the media on the machine dedicated to running the server and be able to access that media anywhere and not have to worry about storing it on my laptop or desktop. I definitely think that I might begin to use my own cloud services rather than third party services. Not only would it eliminate the privacy concerns with third parties, I think it would also be kind of fun to do.

Despite knowledge of the privacy concerns with using third party cloud services, I do think I have the moral standing to complain about encroachments on privacy. This is because these third party services claim to secure your data and keep it private. Given this, if they don’t keep your data private, or if government surveillance leverages this data, I am justified in complaining because the assurances I had were not met. While I understand the risks in entrusting a third party with my data, that doesn’t mean I should just accept it if my data is not kept secure.