Nate Anderson writes:
The Federal Trade Commission worries that consumers don’t really understand the privacy implications to storing some of their most crucial data in the cloud, and it wants the FCC to think about such issues when finalizing its national broadband plan.
Take Google’s new Nexus One phone as a case study of the pros and cons of storing life details on remote servers. Nexus One phones can back up their complete settings to Google’s servers, including data such as “Wi-Fi passwords, bookmarks, a list of the applications you’ve installed, the words you’ve added to the dictionary used by the onscreen keyboard, and most of the settings that you configure with the Settings application.” Get a new phone and the data transfers easily.
But that data is now sitting on servers outside of your control, where it can be accessed far more easily by Google itself, hackers, and law enforcement than it ever could if kept within the device. Once data passes over the network, it gets much easier to access in realtime; once it is stored on a remote server, it gets much easier to access at any time.
Read more on Ars Technica.