Some misunderstood my post here. Anything you put in the cloud, even when set as "private", is only a "soft" setting, as the cloud's supplier can still have a look at it (even through bots) if he feels so, unless expressly stated. That's sanctioned by the terms of use, and anything even vaguely identifying me (as Google does by logging everything anyone does with their services and build a profile from this data) should not be placed in reach of any company.
Do you guys seriously consider the "Private" folder in your Drobpox account to be out of reach of prying eyes?
Oh, and the storage options for the rMBP are up to 768GB - for those who are willing to spend the money.
Still smaller than 1TB with standard drives, smaller than an after-market dual HDD MacBook Pro could be, and of course, much, much more expensive.
(...)At least I wouldn't have assumed the scenario where a company downloads the private folder content of hundred of thousands MobileMe user "randomly". (As already asked before, how did they get the account names? Try and error or "fished" in the net or what?) Again: Personally, I wouldn't have put any private data in the public folder nevertheless. But I also don't like this kind of "service" ...
Customer's data, résumés, master's thesis data, recipes, all belong to either of the following categories: contain pieces of personal information, or need to be accessed while offline. What could be safely offloaded to the cloud are large media files that need to be locally stored for decent-speed synchronization with portable media players and living room TV. Their size compared to the current internet connections and caps just don't allow offloading these.
Still, it's not practical to have everything in the cloud, at the very last, or squarely dangerous to one's privacy. And what could be put in there is actually too large to be moved that far from the user.
EXACTLY the reason why I won't put anything of any value to me anywhere outside of my physical control. Grabbing my iDisk content ? That's the same as stealing my wallet, to me. If you nick my wallet, purportedly for the purpose of archiving it for the future, I will still have lost my wallet, and it is still a theft. As long as companies can copy, archive, access, fiddle with my personal data, and they are free from culpability, they can forget about me using their services. Fair enough with the web sites, but iDisk data ??? Come on !!!
It was the Public part, not Private, but the only difference is the former may be viewed and downloaded by any layperson, and the latter may be accessed by hackers, or any employee from the cloud storage provider, both of which without you knowing. I don't feel my data is safe with either of them, especially not in the USA. At least with local storage, you can reasonably expect to know when your data is being read. Encrypted cloud storage providers are very few and far between, and clients take significant CPU power.
Until strong encryption generalization, I will still consider cloud storage to be a honeypot of sort for companies to exert and refine bots on real-world data.
