The Federal Trade Commission must not be very busy these days. I say that because of its decision to look into cloud computing. Apparently, it’s worried about the security and privacy implications of storing data remotely. I find this a bizarre target of inquiry.
ReadWrite Enterprise considers the FTC’s investigation, saying:
In the filing, The FTC recognizes the cost savings of cloud computing but has concerns about information being stored remotely:
“However, the storage of data on remote computers may also raise privacy and security concerns for consumers,” wrote David Vladeck, who helms the FTC’s Consumer Protection Bureau.
This statement is puzzling. People have been storing their data remotely since the early 1990s on services that predate the social networks.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. Data has been stored on computers remotely for many years. Moreover, how is remote data storage much more dangerous than on-site data storage? Firms have long had networks that hackers could attempt to break into for quite some time. If hackers attempt to access a cloud computing database, how is that any different from if they just broke into a company’s or individual’s network directly instead?
I’m sure there’s a lot of valuable work that the FTC could be doing. This isn’t it. Let’s hope it just amounts to a waste of time and doesn’t prevent any technological innovation that cloud computing could bring.
