It never ceases to amaze me how people have bought into "cloud" computing. Its hard enough to protect your own data, on your own secure machine. Once you entrust your data to a third party you should have absolutely no doubt that it is at risk. The larger the organization that that third party is, the more inherently insecure it is. In the cloud, it only takes one careless, stupid, or inept person to expose the data of thousands (or millions). And you can't fix stupid.
I guess it depends on the data we are talking about?
I have a huge photo library, but I'm not a professional photographer. I'm not going to sell any of the photos I have on my computer. So when Apple told me I could offload all that data to the cloud, and worry about it less (from a backup perspective), I said "absolutely".
Sensitive data is more problematic. But the vast majority of people aren't handling "sensitive" data.
>I guess it depends on the data we are talking about?
Absolutely it depends.
> But the vast majority of people aren't handling "sensitive" data.
I don't think that is necessarily true, but it would depend on how you define "sensitive". If you are storing data in the cloud that you are happy sharing with the public, then security isn't an issue. However, many people backup all of their data in the cloud (you need look no further then OneDrive that comes with every copy of Windows 10). This includes their financial information, tax returns, intimate personal information, and other things that would horrify them if they were exposed to the public. Most do so without understanding the risks because cloud computing has been sold so heavily by the government, corporations, and media outlets.
And we aren't just talking about individuals. Many, if not most, corporations use cloud computing to store their data. This includes financial data, customer information, credit cards, account numbers, and everything else you can imagine.
I'm not trying to argue cloud computing doesn't have its uses. I have no problem using the Steam cloud to save my game in Civilization 5, regardless of how insecure their servers are. But the risks are very real any time you entrust your data (or anything else) to a third party, and they should be recognized.
No thanks, I'll keep control over my own data.