Oh, how I love my online life. I've got my calendar on google, my e-mail on yahoo, my friends on Facebook, and my hookups on Adam for Adam. I never want to go back to the old way where all my data was stuck on my little PC with no one to connect with. But something has been lost in the transition from desktop to cloud computing. I used to know where my data was, and who could see it. But now I ship it all off to a third-party data warehouse where it is subject to being mined, sold, stolen, subpoenaed, and lost. Companies like Facebook and Google exist to collect my data and find ways to make money off of it. Suddenly I feel overexposed.
I believe that with a little work the existing plumbing of the web could be fixed to provide stronger users with better protection and more control over their online lives.
The Wrong Way
Google, Facebook, and a host of web 2.0 startups are eager to lure me in with lovely web applications to manage my life online. The provide some amazing applications, and a gob of free storage. It seems ideal until you consider that Google and Facebook now have all your data. These companies business model is to get you hooked on their apps so they can sell your data. Not only that but all sorts of bad things can happen to your data -- you could get locked out (lost password or outage), it could get stolen by hackers or cops, or deleted (happened to my Yahoo Mail once).
UberCMS and Blind Web Hosts
Why should I send my off to be exploited by the big guys? Why not run my own cloud applications on a neutral web host (like my beloved Dreamhost). Drupal and other open source CMS and web application servers are maturing. Why not build all my apps like social networking, calendaring, blogging, webmail, to-do lists, etc. into my own web site and run that off my host. I would expect that my web host would keep their hands off my data, and protect it on disk and on the wire using encryption. They wouldn't even know what data and apps they were hosting for me. They would be blind hosts, paid to keep the bandwidth open, the servers running, and my data safe.
