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[2+2=5]

Data are money, a very huge chunk of money.

Without the cloud when we are offline our data are stored in our PC and there's no way for anyone to get them without approaching the PC, when we are online, between viruses, trojan, spam, ads, sites and social networks that ask for data etc people and companies do the impossible to get our data, but always with our assent or fraudulently.

Why going through all this shit when they can just convince us to give all our data to them?
When in the cloud we don't know what companies do with our data.

It would not be very different from what social networks already do, social networks convinced people to share all their personal data on their own will, only after some time we were informed that data were collected and sold to companies.

Am i paranoid?

Sorry if already discussed.

 

[PetriP-TNT]

Let's see

http://☁.com

It seems that OP is correct, The Cloud is another way to retrieve personal data

 

[jelly]

Data is worth a lot of money cloud or not, your bank etc knows plenty from what you buy and were.

As for companies wanting you to use the cloud, someone like Google, data is ad money, Microsoft not so much, Dropbox more subscriptions. The core going through many of them is ecosystem, get the user in, leverage other services and keep them there, might not use YouTube but Android, score. Doesn't have an Xbox but uses Office and Windows, score. That Microsoft Account, Google account is key for walking into the ecosystem that is always growing and they hope you'll never leave and lastly with cloud anywhere comes subscription and no better money spinner than that outside of ads. Engagement at all times means possibly more money at all times.

 

[BronsonLee]

You are paranoid.

 

[twobear]

Probably depends on the company?

 

[davepoobond]

i think it has more to do with attaching you to their service because of the data rather than what is in the data

 

[KarmaCow]

Isn't that just assumed to be true at this point, if not explicitly stated? I'm under no illusions that Google isn't data mining everything uploaded to Drive somehow.

 

[Guevara]

i think it has more to do with attaching you to their service because of the data rather than what is in the data

Exactly: storage is a commodity, but if you have all your stuff with Google you're less likely to leave AND more likely to try other Google products.

 

[Afrodium]

A company that provides cloud computing services is also providing security of data to its customers. Anyone who's business depends on customers trusting that their data is safe in their hands is not going to jeopardize that. A company would go bankrupts soon as news gets out that said company is mining private data that the customers assume is secure. Companies that offer more than just cloud storage, such as Google, do mine private data, but they are upfront about what data of yours they are using. Google employees are not rifling through your photos on Google Drive because that would be a huge liability to the company and they aren't willing to take that risk.

 

[Blizzard]

I think you should basically assume the NSA and/or law enforcement have anything you've ever done or stored on the internet anyway, whether or not an individual company knows they're allowing it.

 

[sixteen-bit]

information is valuable

 

[HUELEN10]

Wait OP, you mean you don't use your own personal FTP server?

 

[ronito]

Cloud as a selling point? Or Cloud as a way of gathering data about you?

Why not both?

 

[Elfforkusu]

Encrypt your data before you upload it. Problem solved.

But yes, it's going to be mined as soon as companies figure out a way to profit from it.

 

[ersocaster]

Just about any service you can think of is gathering data about you. But you shouldn't be paranoid about it. I developed the process for my employer's site to track and process data about users. Guess what I grab? Your age, gender and what page you visit. That's it.

Companies don't want names or personal information, they want information that will help generate habits so that they can push products to people based on their habits.