A while back, (Was it really two years ago??) I considered breaking up with Google and enumerated the steps involved should I ever want to close my Google account. This lends itself to the question: why would I want to close my Google account?
First off, I don't. Not really. But it's a bit unsettling when you consider how much of your data is housed on Google's servers and to what degree Google correlates and queries the data. They can quite easily look at your calendar, emails, and google map GPS history, and stitch bits from those sources together to paint quite a detailed picture of your life. And they can do this algorithmically - without a human being ever looking at the data involved, and thus circumvent privacy concerns. Because software peering into your personal data is less intrusive than a person reading your email, right? Or is it? It's not an easy question to answer, but I think most would agree that it's a bit unsettling. I still believe that we might be better off if the data that is currently housed in the cloud could be controlled by the data's true owner - the person who wrote those emails or navigated those streets.
The NSA revelations of 2013 and 2014 only reinforce the importance of being in control over your own data. When the NSA is reading your emails, recording every phone call you ever make, and sabotaging internet security protocols, keeping potentially sensitive data on your own drive in your own home is a tempting notion.
But I say that even as I'm about to buy cloud storage space - I'm considering Carbonite, Backblaze, and Crashplan. Not having to manage local backups from a PC to an external drive, and not having worry about losing family photos if there's ever a fire is worth it. To me, the big issue isn't so much the data being stored remotely, it's too much data being stored, and potentially mined, by a single company. We know that Google does this, even if it's only done by bots and not people, in order to target advertising. To me, the big issue is what happens with the data. If it's stored remotely and only ever read by me and my own processes, then to me that's just fine. If I pay a cloud storage provider and my data is stored encrypted such that only I can ever access it, then that's wonderful. To this end, I'll trust the cloud backup providers more than I'll trust the Googles and Facebooks and Amazons of the world.
The two chunks of data currently have in the cloud which concern me the most are my search history (stored by Google) and my email history. (GMail, so again... Google) I've been using DuckDuckGo for a while now, so the search history may be less an issue, but there's always the searches before a certain point in time, as well as the searches I may have performed on YouTube, Google Maps, or Google Plus. Probably not a huge deal, especially were those searches not associable with my email.
But the email is a significant cache of data. And as more time goes by, I'm more and more considering leaving GMail and going back to POP3 mail. I currently check my email from my phone and from my home PC. It seems easy enough to have emails left on the server until I download them to my home PC, so as to keep syncronization between mail clients, but I haven't yet tried that, and I'm not fully aware of what difficulties and annoyances might arise. Webmail is the new norm, and I've grown so accustomed to the convenience of Google's nested labeling system that leaving it behind might be more of a pain than I'd like. There are likely many other gmail features that I've forgotten about. I take for granted their stellar spam filter. A check into my spam folder quickly reveals how much spam is being filtered.
Another issue is one my wife has had with GMail. When you set up a non-GMail email address with a GMail inbox, you can set it up as a forwarder, in which case mail sent from that address is received with headers that indicate it's been sent "on behalf of" whomever@gmail.com, or you can have it use your own domain's SMTP. Should you send with your own SMTP, there appear to be certain difficulties. My wife has all-too-frequent delays, where emails take hours to be delivered. Many emails aren't incredibly time-sensitive, but some are, and it's sometimes a real problem.
I've done a very good job of owning my own data for the most part. I've ripped all my CDs to mp3, and they live on an external hard drive connected to my router as an ad-hoc NAS. The actual CDs live in a box, buried in my attic. I've already had one drive die and had to go through the tedious process of re-ripping everything. It's good to have the backup, though. Also resident on the NAS: All our family photos and a number of ripped DVDs. We do keep the DVD originals more accessible, but it's nice not to have to swap out discs. We've had the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player for years, but when I buy movies, I'll generally grab a DVD over a Blu-Ray, as being forced to watch unskippable trailers on a disc I own is horribly annoying. And the thing I'm currently excited about is my new Raspberry Pi, running the OpenELEC version of XBMC. This is what I'm excited about this week.
It's good to take ownership of your own data, whether that be movies and music you've purchased, photos you've taken, or just your emails. Entrusting your music to Apple, photos to Facebook, or emails to Google just feels far too fraught with risk. I'm trying not to take a paranoid stance on things, but I'm considering the facts and doing my best to proceed in an informed and reasonable way as relates to the cloud. Will I quit gmail? Perhaps. Not today though.