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What Steve Wozniak Didn't Say -- But Should Have

This article is more than 10 years old.

Steve Wozniak (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Steve Wozniak stuck his foot in it the other day.

I refer – but only sort of (and more on that in a minute) – to his recent comments about cloud computing. "I really worry about everything going to the cloud," Wozniak told the audience, according to Agence France-Presse and via Business Insider.  "I think it's going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years."

The Apple co-founder pretty much left it at that other than to hint at losing ownership of property in the cloud and losing other digital rights.

Actually, much to Apple’s probable chagrin, Wozniak has a point. But where he only ‘sort of’ went rogue, at least in my opinion, was by limiting his comments to consumers and the dangers the cloud poses to them. What about businesses, Steve?

In fact, businesses are highly vulnerable to risks in the cloud. I am not referring to, at least in this post, security or infrastructure issues which were hashed out years ago, quite ably too, but the likes of Salesforce.com and Oracle with their cloud offerings.

Rather the legal issue of who owns what when it is placed in the cloud can put a business at significant risk. It is well known that the government has pushed the case that emails are not protected when hosted by third party providers because they have left the premises of the corporation. “Technically, as far as the government is concerned, anything that has been placed in possession of a third party – such as a document on Google Docs – is far game for a subpoena,” says Christopher M. Collins, an attorney with Vanderpool, Frostick & Nishanian, P.C.

One possible way around this, he suggests, is to encrypt data so that theoretically even the host does not have a key—only the customer or end user or whoever is the true owner of the data would have the key. That way, Collins says, the company can argue that it never relinquished control of the data to a third party provider.

“If you want to be absolutely sure, from a legal perspective, though, keep sensitive data on your own corporate server,” he says.

Privacy is another issue about which businesses –and not just consumers—should be concerned, Charles King, principle of Pund-IT told me.

IBM made headlines when it disallowed its employees from using Apple’s Siri after it realized that Apple was storing all of the voice commands used with Siri – voice commands send to the cloud in real time to be processed.

IBM asked Apple about the practice and didn’t get a satisfactory response.

“IBM said ‘our employees presumably using Siri for their jobs and we don’t want what might be proprietary information stored in someone else’s cloud,’” King said.