Clouds, farms and bytes! Oh my!

I watched a show on TV Ontario last night about “the cloud” and it’s impact on the internet population. I had never thought of it, but I store and update data in the cloud every day when I log into Gmail or Google Docs. The cloud is a term for the collective storage space out there on the internet, typically managed in large data centers run by companies with too much money to spend on hardware and square footage. One such company is Google, who recently spent a couple billion dollars on new server farms in the United States. When you you update your documents stored on Google Documents, they are are saved somewhere out there, out of your control, but safe from hackers and such.

But are they really? We assume that companies will be responsible with our data; that they will protect it from malicious people who might abuse the information to their advantage. We also tend to forget to read the fine print about ownership of said information. Does Google own my spreadsheets since I store them on their portion of the cloud? Or are they just storing them for me? I better go back and read the terms of service…