Stallman Continues to Warn Against Cloud Computing as Google Gets Ready to Push ChromeOS
December 14th, 2010Via: Guardian:
Google’s new cloud computing ChromeOS looks like a plan “to push people into careless computing” by forcing them to store their data in the cloud rather than on machines directly under their control, warns Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the operating system GNU.
Two years ago Stallman, a computing veteran who is a strong advocate of free software via his Free Software Foundation, warned that making extensive use of cloud computing was “worse than stupidity” because it meant a loss of control of data.
Now he says he is increasingly concerned about the release by Google of its ChromeOS operating system, which is based on GNU/Linux and designed to store the minimum possible data locally. Instead it relies on a data connection to link to Google’s “cloud” of servers, which are at unknown locations, to store documents and other information.
The risks include loss of legal rights to data if it is stored on a company’s machine’s rather than your own, Stallman points out: “In the US, you even lose legal rights if you store your data in a company’s machines instead of your own. The police need to present you with a search warrant to get your data from you; but if they are stored in a company’s server, the police can get it without showing you anything. They may not even have to give the company a search warrant.”
Google gave ChromeOS a “soft” launch last week, showing off aspects of the software and providing developers and some journalists with Cr-48 laptops set up to run it, while saying that it won’t be widely available until mid-2011.
Wouldn’t the only way to have at least a semblance of “complete” control over your data be to keep it on a computer with absolutely no means of connecting to the internet in any way shape or form?