Clouds and my experience with the "Magic Smoke"

No, this isn't a confessional.  The Magic Smoke I am talking about is something that at my old job we called the "Genie" - that smoke that appears when an electronic device burns up or short-circuits.  Proper usage is, "Dave powered on the reference desk CPU, heard a crackling, and saw the genie escape."  Or one might say in a stern, chiding way, "It's definitely down since you let out the magic smoke!"  While I (thankfully) don't have to deal with it, at least on a regular basis anymore at work, the genie escaped from my home PC about 6 months ago causing a mini-crisis in my home.  After some work, all was well and 99.9% of our home network life was restored (the remaining 0.1% was lost saved games - the kids were a little miffed...)

What's the point, you ask?  A good portion of my documents, spreadsheets, etc. and software were not stored on my genie-less PC, they were stored in "the Cloud".  This situation certainly has its advantages.  I could use our other computer to work in the meantime, for one.  Also, there was no fretting over anything but the inconvenience of having to order new guts for the dead computer.  Cloud computing saved me again a couple of weeks ago when my work computer succumbed after a battle with a drive-by virus.  A combination of keeping important and/or currently used documents in the cloud and on a back-up USB hard drive made the whole experience much more tolerable since I lost no data.

But there are some worrisome aspects of cloud lurking always in the back of my mind.  Not least of these is privacy.  Although that is an 18 month-old article, the fight over who can see how much of your info out there in the "cloud" is still raging.  This brings a definite sense of insecurity to privacy-minded folks, like librarians.  Google, Amazon, and those sorts of commercial enterprises already track our searching to serve us targeted ads, ISPs could potentially (and may be already) tracking much more.  Nearly 5 years ago, an agency of the federal government was alleged to have captured data without warrant and with the cooperation of AT&T, (the folks trying to deflect the issue in that "privacy" article above).

Privacy issues aside, cloud computing appears to be gaining considerable, if sometimes grudging, acceptance.  And, as with all new twists in our technological world, our library and libraries everywhere will continue to wrestle with it.