Why use cloud? when 10TB plus are easy to optain & cheap

[Rick Law]

Intellectual Property ownership of the content stored in the cloud is a question.  When you upload stuff to your cloud, they can control what content you can store there already.  So, do you own the content or don't you?  How sure are you that the cloud operator will not inspect or use the content you stored there?

Fair point, I was more arguing from a business perspective, vs you have a consumer perspective in mind: if you upload stuff for free then yes, there have been numerous "end user agreements" trying to rip you off your ownership rights (e.g. Facebook, Whatsapp). I cannot comment however about the legality of such practices. Not that I would approve of course.

Indeed I was looking at it from the consumer perspective.  In the USA, under the reasoning that just because you formed a company, you don't loose your legal rights (or liability) as a person.  So a corporation is treated as a person (or persons) in general.

The article I quoted taken as a whole, is more so addressing to both business and consumers.  Let me redo one quote from a business perspective with added bold.

"The problem may be bigger in the business world. What really happens to all those backups to the cloud?  If you are using a service to back up your data what kind of protections do you have? How is that data being protected? What about transferability [SIC] from one location to another or one vendor to another? Do my intellectual rights and data ownership claims follow the data?  These are all very good questions and they all reside in the grey area of the legal system. "

Unless you have explicit explicit legal agreement to clearly define ownership, your ownership of cloud-stored IP would be in that grey area.  There is one grey area particularly difficult to navigate: M&A (mergers and acquisition) and bankruptcy.  Both the cloud provider and the cloud user may undergo that.  What then? 

So each contract renewals must be carefully reviewed by lawyers.  If the cloud provider went bankrupt, their financial liability is gone with the bankruptcy.  What about interruption to your services that resulted in lost of revenue?  So more lawyers...

Now that is only your direct risk/cost.  What about your liability to your clients?  Say you are the photographer/videograher and you have a version of standard contract with clients that includes confidentiality (which is common for an event photographer).  Say you were contracted for a bachelor party (and with confidentiality).  We can all imagine how wild it could get.  (edit, adding this) We all know how a video can catch things your eyes didn't see while taking the video.  Now the cloud's AI already scanned the content and found pronograph, that fallout begins.(end-edit) .  Now imagine those videos/photos are on the open-web...  Folks here are smart enough to do EE, so folks here can all imagine the bind you would be in and I don't need to go further.

When the risk and risk-mitigation costs are included, that 10TB+ storage may no longer looks so cheap.

[VooDust]

"The problem may be bigger in the business world. What really happens to all those backups to the cloud?  If you are using a service to back up your data what kind of protections do you have? How is that data being protected? What about transferability [SIC] from one location to another or one vendor to another? Do my intellectual rights and data ownership claims follow the data?  These are all very good questions and they all reside in the grey area of the legal system. "

That quote from the article is plain ignorance (I prefer calling it uninformed bullshit). For contrast, let's hear it from the cloud vendors themselves:

AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-privacy-faq/

Code: [Select]

"As a customer, you maintain ownership of your content, and you select which AWS services can process, store, and host your content.
We do not access or use your content for any purpose without your agreement.
We never use customer content or derive information from it for marketing or advertising."

Azure: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamentals/protection-customer-data

Code: [Select]

Microsoft does not inspect, approve, or monitor applications that customers deploy to Azure.
Moreover, Microsoft does not know what kind of data customers choose to store in Azure.
Microsoft does not claim data ownership over the customer information that's entered into Azure.

Now that is only your direct risk/cost.  What about your liability to your clients?  Say you are the photographer/videograher and you have a version of standard contract with clients that includes confidentiality (which is common for an event photographer).  Say you were contracted for a bachelor party (and with confidentiality).  We can all imagine how wild it could get.  (edit, adding this) We all know how a video can catch things your eyes didn't see while taking the video.  Now the cloud's AI already scanned the content and found pronograph, that fallout begins.(end-edit) .

Counter question: If illegal activities were taking place and you were there to film it, didn't that make you complicit to begin with? The cloud's AI would simply be a catalyst of things that were already there. Technology is not the culprit. Humans are.

As for the assessment of the risk to your business, this is really the call of the business owner. Whoever is concerned about business continuity has to decide. Naturally, having a backup in the cloud is not insurance. Old-school lessons learned the hard way still apply 

Again, it's important to define what cloud we are talking about: An actual cloud services provider, or any product company offering a shitty pseudo cloud service where e.g. your camera or data feed goes over their servers. These companies have previously come up with any kind of odd rules and that's where I would identify the grey-area.

[Berni]

This is probably more of a safety net for the cloud computing providers where they can say "We had no idea this user was doing illegal things using our services since we are not allowed to look at any of there data. Look its in the terms of service!" so that all the responsibility for the illegal actions is on the user, not on them.

Similar to how ISPs are not held responsible for transferring TOR pages of shady black market deals or providing certain kinds of porn that Apple recently clamped down on. But at the same time they are not allowed to look into any of the data or tamper with it. Yet then again the US government also holds a gun to the ISPs head to force them to also provide the NSA with a transcript of all the traffic going trough them.

[Rick Law]

"The problem may be bigger in the business world. What really happens to all those backups to the cloud?  If you are using a service to back up your data what kind of protections do you have? How is that data being protected? What about transferability [SIC] from one location to another or one vendor to another? Do my intellectual rights and data ownership claims follow the data?  These are all very good questions and they all reside in the grey area of the legal system. "

That quote from the article is plain ignorance (I prefer calling it uninformed bullshit). For contrast, let's hear it from the cloud vendors themselves:

AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-privacy-faq/

Code: [Select]

"As a customer, you maintain ownership of your content, and you select which AWS services can process, store, and host your content.
We do not access or use your content for any purpose without your agreement.
We never use customer content or derive information from it for marketing or advertising."

Azure: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamentals/protection-customer-data

Code: [Select]

Microsoft does not inspect, approve, or monitor applications that customers deploy to Azure.
Moreover, Microsoft does not know what kind of data customers choose to store in Azure.
Microsoft does not claim data ownership over the customer information that's entered into Azure.

In court, what you need is what is on the written contract that you and the vendor signed.  To ensure that the contract itself is secure for your needs, you need it to be reviewed by a lawyer.  To commit based on what they say on the web is risky at best.

...

Now that is only your direct risk/cost.  What about your liability to your clients?  Say you are the photographer/videograher and you have a version of standard contract with clients that includes confidentiality (which is common for an event photographer).  Say you were contracted for a bachelor party (and with confidentiality).  We can all imagine how wild it could get.  (edit, adding this) We all know how a video can catch things your eyes didn't see while taking the video.  Now the cloud's AI already scanned the content and found pronograph, that fallout begins.(end-edit) .

Counter question: If illegal activities were taking place and you were there to film it, didn't that make you complicit to begin with? The cloud's AI would simply be a catalyst of things that were already there. Technology is not the culprit. Humans are.

As for the assessment of the risk to your business, this is really the call of the business owner. Whoever is concerned about business continuity has to decide. Naturally, having a backup in the cloud is not insurance. Old-school lessons learned the hard way still apply 

Again, it's important to define what cloud we are talking about: An actual cloud services provider, or any product company offering a shitty pseudo cloud service where e.g. your camera or data feed goes over their servers. These companies have previously come up with any kind of odd rules and that's where I would identify the grey-area.

Your counter question:"If illegal activities were taking place and you were there to film it, didn't that make you complicit to begin with?"

If you are contracted to film an event, stuff that happens to occur in the background or the surroundings are not part of the main event.  Your film just happen to catch things that in the background.  I emphasized in the re-edit that it was something you didn't see it during filming.  You did include that re-edit in you quotes, but you did not considered that in your reply.

So my answer to your counter question is:  I didn't see it, I didn't even know it was going on, so how would I be complicit?

That said, in the USA, legally speaking you can walk by a rape-in-progress, do nothing, and you have no legal liability at all.  Let alone if it just happened to be in your film in the background.  On the other hand, if you accept a contract to film a rape, that would be a different story.

It boils down to this: Do you like the decisions made by Andriod/Apple/Microsoft (and others) with their products?

Personally, I don't like many of the decisions Andriod's designers made for their products.  I don't like their product reliability either.  I have the same sentiment with Apple, Microsoft, and others.  Why then would I be comfortable for their AI engine to decide whether my content is within or outside legal bounds. 

[SiliconWizard]

All in all, it's about what you are willing to delegate and to whom.

As others have said, maintaining one's own data storage long term, taking backups and security seriously is not completely trivial.
OTOH, there are of course drawbacks with delegating this to some "cloud" service.

You can absolutely deal with this all by yourself. But if you do, at least know what needs to be done to be safe - and then consider if you're going to do this on the long term.
Frequent backups are of course a primary concern. That adds time and cost - you need backup means. And, storing your backups in a different place is also a good idea. (Cause, what if you have a fire at the place you host your main data storage, or burglary?) Do you have a safe second location for this, and are you willing to go back and forth on a regular basis?

But OTOH, don't think that cloud storage is the panacea. Shit happens. So even if you use cloud storage, you should always have your own backup, at least for your critical data. You may probably just backup less regularly in this case.

[Psi]

Yeah, backups are a big issue,  any 'automatic' backup is problematic unless there's a human checking on a regular basis that it's still working and that the backup files are actually there and are readable (checksum match).

If you setup your own 'automatic' backup running from your home server to an offsite server you run a big risk.
That when you actually need to use your backup you may discover it has not been working for the past year.   
Cloud services allow you to have an automatic backup system that you don't need to keep checking on.

[Berni]

I would say that automatic backups are the better option because people have to remember doing manual backups. People often have better things to do than taking care of this thing that they don't need in the near future anyway, so the task of doing a manual backup tends to get pushed off for later... and later... and later, until you eventually forget about backups completely, then once shit goes down and you need the backup you find that the latest backup is actually from 5 years ago.

The automatic backup just simply happens on its own and it can be scheduled to run in off peak hours such as during the night. The backup solution usually knows when a backup has failed for some reason (destination being down, out of disk space etc...), so its mostly a matter of setting up some form of notification for it. Be it a email notification, having the server beep its internal speaker etc... something to get your attention and investigate what went wrong. The target can be a backup to some remote machine you own or a cloud service, does not matter. Can even be a machine in a different room of the same house. Yes loosing your whole house is a real possibility but a very very rare one unless you live in a particularly natural disaster prone area.

That being said it is also a good idea to keep a manual backup of the most important data for just in case. Something like copy everything to a large external hard drive once a year and physically unplug it. In case something goes horribly wrong and loose automatic backups its still better to have out of date data than no data at all. Perhaps store that external drive at your parents house too.

[DiTBho]

I wrote a program that makes me remember critical events

• girlfriend's birthday
• when to pay taxes
• when to check backups

It's based on UNIX Cron, and it's able to send messages to my wristwatch.

[Labrat101]

I wrote a program that makes me remember critical events

• girlfriend's birthday
• when to pay taxes
• when to check backups

It's based on UNIX Cron, and it's able to send messages to my wristwatch.

Nice idea . Good plan .
Definitely don't forget the girlfriend's birthday.
 

[Psi]

I would say that automatic backups are the better option because people have to remember doing manual backups.

If non-cloud automatic backup is desired the correct way to do it is to have two separate backup scripts.  One does the actual backup and the other does a periodic MD5sum (or similar) to all files in the backup and source locations to confirm they still match.
Both scripts check the date the other script was last executed to confirm its still running.
If there's an error of any kind either script is set to notify you using 3 different forms of messaging.
It's better to have the two scripts executing on two separate computers, eg source does the copy and destination does the check.

It's not fool proof, but its pretty reliable .
(obviously you apply this to having 3 copes,  local, and two offsite)