More thoughts on decentralization

It’s becoming quite interesting to watch the tech news, it still seems that people are piling into the clouds, despite various warnings with regards to costs and privacy. Just spotted this on the Register; Surprise! We’ve sort of reached a point where not only do companies no longer (typically) need to run all services in the cloud, it’s actually cheaper to do the things you want to do without explicitly having a cloud based presence. Instead, utilize a cheap or free commodity web resource to announce your presence, then host all of your resources yourself. (or ideally over multiple redundant non-cloud locations)

Privacy - remember that?

AI is being trained with all sorts of “public” data (sometimes, apparently, despite potential copyright issues). For those who hold private data with large AI adopting companies, how confident are you that those AI models are not being trained on your “private” data, i.e. social media DM’s, emails etc? It must be quite a tempting prospect for them, all that juicy data just sitting there, waiting for a change to their fine-print to say “all your data belong to us!”. (or if you look at some of the current fine-print, “all the rest of your data …”) Moreover, if you are relying on say emails for any reason (accounts, evidence of work, evidence of where you were and when), does the idea of having all that under the control of someone else not frighten you just a little bit? (and when I say “someone else”, I’m referring to a faceless system administrator, potentially in another country, with “root”) I just watched this week’s “Silent Witness” on the BBC, it topically raises similar concerns of big tech companies / privacy and highlights why local data might be a “better” way to go. Seems ironic that the BBC have spotted and highlighted the issue, but the government, they’ve given us the online safety bill. (which you might in some places see referred to as the “snoopers charter”)

How do you like your privacy?

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