Dangerous Clouds
by Donald Blake
Using a cloud-based system is all the rave these days.
It's efficient, fast, and easy to use. You really can't live in today's society without using a cloud-based system to store your data. With all the commercial cloud-based systems out there, one has to wonder who's got more data - the government or commercial enterprises.
From the various government agencies I know, they collect some pretty valuable information.
I know they have my address, driver's license, tax information, employer information, phone number, Social Security number, passport, and legal history.
They also collect various bits of information about me every year or every couple of years, but this is pretty much what they have. They may have other data on me from some classified operation. But seriously, even if they do, the list of data sources above paints a pretty good picture of me anyway. Besides, how big can their database really be and how much do they care about me? I'm just a regular Joe trying to keep a job, pay my bills, and find girls. I'd be flattered if a person ever wanted to know everything there was to know about little old me.
I'm not completely out of luck because there are computer systems out there that do want to know me - down to the smallest detail.
Cell phones are really just a human tracking system. Cell phone companies track your every move and can locate your phone at any time anywhere as long as it's on. They know where the hell you are at every minute of the day! Cell phone companies really do care how you use your phone because there's a dollar value attached to it. The ability to track you makes it so they can provide you with better service and they can also tell you where you go over a course of time. They can also sell this information to other companies that could use this data as well.
I'm still waiting for the day businesses start caring about IP addresses that walk in their door.
That would give them so much power. That would tell them how many people come into their stores just to browse and how many actually bought something. They would also know how long their customers stayed in their store. If they also talked to the navigation companies, they would know where their customers came from and went to after visiting their store. With that information, they could better serve their customers. They would basically be able to get for a physical store the kind of data a website gets from people who visit the site.
When was the last time you set foot into your financial institution?
Has it been a while since you last talked to a teller at your bank? If the answer is yes, then you're not alone. Most people don't go to their financial institution anymore. They can get everything they need online. Nice and convenient, isn't it? Everything is fed into a computer which is then stored in a database somewhere. If you were a financial institution, wouldn't it be cool if you knew what your clients were buying? Then you could use that information to sell products to your clients.
When they go shopping for a car, you could analyze their financial situation and tell them if the car they were thinking of buying was something they could afford. Since you have the same type of data on other people, you could also tell them if it was a good deal or not because you would know how much other people paid for the same car. Then you could offer them a nice loan for it too! With your members' permission, you could also make this information available for others' use for other reasons.
We can be whoever we want to be.
Let's be someone who's interested in stocks. If we could tap into financial institutions and find out what people were buying and from whom, then we could tell which companies were going to be profitable or not. Why care about earnings? We know exactly who's profitable and who's not because we're watching what people buy! Forget about government reports that come out every so often. We can tell how well the economy is doing and our information is in real time!
This isn't that difficult to do.
All you need to do is analyze the financial institutions database and look for the merchant's name, and then note what the person bought and from whom. This could be broken out into reports since storage and bandwidth is cheap. The cost of computers, networking, and manpower to maintain all of this is expensive; maybe the financial institution was nice enough to outsource all of their computer operations to another company like Member Driven Technologies. Assuming that the outsourced company has multiple clients, they could have trillions of dollars located on their servers! Feel free to use your imagination with what else you could do if you got a hold of that data!
Humans are social creatures.
If we don't talk to other people, we develop problems. What you put online has an effect on your social status. We want to show our friends what we are doing and they want to know what our friends are doing. We post pictures of our families as well as events that we attend online. It sure as Hell beats printing photos and putting them in an envelope with a note to all of our friends and family talking about the event.
It's so much easier to put them on a social media site and share. However, by doing this, we give away a lot of personal information. The social media company uses this data to make money. The media will also use it to identify you and help them with their story if you do something that is newsworthy.
Everything is connected to the Internet these days and more and more devices are coming online every day.
Practically everything you use that has a computer in it can and will send data to some company database somewhere. Companies use this data to better serve their customers and also to make their software better. It also makes sense to put stuff on their servers that is accessible anywhere because the user can access their data wherever they go and from whatever device they want.
Couple that with a terms of service agreement that flirts with the lines "Any data you send us we can use and sell" and bury it in the small print and then the company is golden! They now have a very good reason to make your data useful, searchable, and marketable! They now know what advertising to send you and what things you're likely to buy because they've analyzed your data - which you were so nice to give them for free!
It also makes sense for them to invest in these systems because your data is driving their business. The more data you give them, the more valuable their systems become and the larger these cloud-based systems become.
People are so worried about the government tracking people.
You probably are in some classified government database, but seriously, how big could it be? For the government to track you, they have to have a budget and it has to be approved by a group of politicians. It's a government-run operation, so we know that whatever that database looks like, it's not going to be done efficiently. When they go about building this database, they'll have to go through contractors to get the parts, which will probably lead to a cost overrun. Also, the people who work on it aren't going to be the best because government employees do not get paid as much as employees of private companies. Not to mention someone, somewhere knows about this system and, depending on the country's mood and politics, it could be declassified.
On the other hand, companies that offer cloud-based solutions have way more data than any government could ever get!
They also want to make their systems bigger and better, because if they do that, then that means they make more money off of all of the data they can get. It pays for them to make these systems as efficient as possible and as high quality as possible. Not to mention that some of these cloud-based systems have contracted with the government and hold your data on their systems for the government!
Considering the data I have in some of these cloud-based systems, the government really is the small fish in the lake. It's really funny to me when I read a story in the news about companies that run cloud-based systems telling the government to not collect data!
I really wish someone knew everything about me other than a computer.
Thanks for reading.
References
Shout out to Violet.