Trying to find others opposed to the cloud.

November 14, 2011 12:11 AM

So...I abhor the growing popularity of cloud computing. Yes, I know I'm revealing my tinfoil hat here, but I want to know if there are advocacy or consumer groups I can support that oppose the spreading cloud?

Convenient sometimes yes, but privacy concerns have led me to believe there must be others like me who hate the idea of even more of our info being stored on remote servers and accessible by god knows who. Please tell me about some clubs, forums or organizations of likeminded citizens who are trying to avoid using the cloud.

And yes, I'm aware google and facebook already know everything about me--but I am concerned that even things like syncing your personal mobile devices are done through remote servers, increasingly without an option to use your personal wifi network.

I'm sure many of you think I'm paranoid. Fine, but please help me find others just as worried (paranoid) as I am. Thank you.

posted by The ____ of Justice to Technology (9 answers total)

The EFF has a much more general focus but you'll almost certainly find like minded people within it. Also I'm sure if you (digitally) followed Richard Stallman around for a while you'd stumble across "your people".
posted by dickasso at 12:26 AM on November 14, 2011

There are more reasons to dislike cloud computing than individual privacy concerns. Some business users aren't too fond of it either - check out The Lone Sysadmin for example. Corporate IT staff don't generally organize into activist clubs, but you can certainly find like-minded people among them.
posted by Dr Dracator at 1:36 AM on November 14, 2011

And yes, I'm aware google and facebook already know everything about me--but I am concerned that even things like syncing your personal mobile devices are done through remote servers

Easy-peasy answer to this: Unless your business or job requires it, don't use Facebook! Or, if you are required to use it by your boss or company, max out the privacy settings. Billions of us worldwide don't give two shakes about Facebook, either in terms of opening an account or looking at other peoples' pages. I've only seen a few Facebook pages. What's Facebook? Don't really know, don't really care.

I'm not sure if there's a workaround for personal mobile devices, but many tinfoil-hat users have a special way to protect their googling for information from prying eyes: Tor, a system that uses multiple levels of encryption through multiple servers to hide your identity. Download the software, install it on your browser, and you're in, free to google (albeit at slightly slower speeds) protected from intrusive viewing.

Now, I sincerely doubt that people would be snooping on your googling anyway, but Tor is an interesting software application and is definitely one of the advocacy groups you're talking about.
posted by Gordion Knott at 2:57 AM on November 14, 2011 [1 favorite]

Tor doesn't use encryption! It's only an anonymizing proxy. Packet sniffers can still show you what is going through Tor, but not who it's going to and from. This is good protection when reading "risky" material, but not when sending personal information, and not when that risky material hangs around in your browser cache for a while.

Since "cloud" services are mostly centralized anyway, one thing you can do is run your own. I have an old-ass laptop that's running an instance of ownCloud, and I save all my files there. In some ways it's better than Dropbox, because everything goes over secure HTTP, and I normally save files straight to the server rather than saving them locally and letting them sync--though that does produce a small amount of lag when I'm in the save file dialog. They're working on a proper sync client, though, and sharing files with friends works as well as anything.

There's also Diaspora, that open-sauce social network that got a lot of play when the Facebook privacy debacle went mainstream. You can host your own instance of that, too, and it will share data with other Diaspora nodes when you tell it to. It's probably not as easy to set up as ownCloud, I haven't tried. I can get you an invite to a public server if you want, though.
posted by LogicalDash at 5:35 AM on November 14, 2011

Mod note: Reminder: the OP's question is about finding advocacy or consumer groups that oppose cloud computing, so we need to stick to that, however tempting it may be to digress.
posted by taz (staff) at 5:48 AM on November 14, 2011

Danny O'Brien (who may still be at the EFF) was certainly concerned about this. Here's a talk by him on this topic.
posted by crocomancer at 8:27 AM on November 14, 2011

From Wikipedia's description of the "onion routing" system used by Tor (whose name is an acronym for "The Onion Router"):

The original data are encrypted and re-encrypted multiple times, then sent through successive Tor relays, each one of which decrypts a "layer" of encryption before passing the data on to the next relay and ultimately the destination.

So, it sounds like Tor does use encryption. I'm not sure if it protects against packet sniffers, however.
posted by Gordion Knott at 8:58 AM on November 14, 2011

OP - The heavy lifting of cloud security will probably happen in government, as there are legal requirements for data usage and control. Also you'll find consumer advocacy groups that are concerned with digital privacy like EFF.Org and CDT.org.

But finding some anti-cloud computing underground -"please help me find others just as worried (paranoid) as I am" to help "fight" against it, well, I don't think there is such a thing.

For two reasons - cloud computing is a huge sprawling term that is shorthand for a massive shift in data center ownage and control that solves a whole bunch of business issues with IT in a very efficient manner. There are years-old federal initiatives that mandate the US Government as a whole to look at cloud-based services for cost savings. Massive numbers of companies use things like Salesforce.com or Google Email - all 'cloud'. So there's not really any going back. You can try telling Netflix they need to build billion dollar data centers rather than use amazon's cloud, or put your effort into protesting the Feds use of clouds across all agencies but at an individual level it's pretty impossible to protest "cloud computing" as a concept without sounding like a crank.

The other reason? The super paranoid probably don't go online to announce their fights against skynet1.0. There's a whole list of reasons why it ain't paranoia if it's true!

TL;DR - I suggest against fighting the cloud as a concept because that ship has sailed. I would focus on what others are allowed to do with your data. Join the EFF and work for strong privacy legislation.
posted by anti social order at 10:21 AM on November 14, 2011 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks, all.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to try going the way you and others have suggested, LogicalDash, and try running my own server (though it's going to take some time because I have very little experience with that stuff.)

I decided to take a look at Dropbox and it's privacy policies. Yikes. This service seems amazingly intimate with my computer, in a way I'm not entirely comfortable with.

EFF sounds like a good org to stay updated with.

Thanks again everyone!
posted by The ____ of Justice at 11:01 AM on November 16, 2011