Looming private information fiasco versus the new cloud business model
The next generation will ask, "Where were you when this was going down?"
Smartphones are going to have it all: proprietary business strategies, chiseling on taxes and expenses, sexual abuse and dysfunction, Roman Catholic confessions, political activities, substance abuse, personnel decision making, love trysts, cancer and mental illness diagnoses and treatments, etc. Government officials will become increasingly knowledgeable about the treasure-trove of intimate personal information and proprietary business information stored in data centers.
Security officials will be forced to recognize the value of this information for preventing terrorism. Since it is politically necessary to do everything possible to prevent terrorism, means will be developed for security agencies to analyze all this information in real time. (The recent US government WikiLeaks subpoenas and National Security Letters to Twitter and others have heightened awareness of the threat. The government has said that it plans to use this information to pressure people to assist in its investigations.) Thus we have reached an existential moment for the fate of our proprietary business and intimate personal information. The next generation will ask "Where were you when this was going down?"
A nation cannot allow its people to be able to be blackmailed or its companies' proprietary information to be taken by foreign security agencies. Before information on a person stored in a company's data centers can be turned over to a foreign government, the company will be required to first get permission from the person's country. If necessary, a nation's intimate personal and company proprietary information will be required to be stored in data centers located in the same nation.
Industry is undertaking a major shift in cloud computing strategy to forestall the above threat to their international business:
• perform computation using customer equipment because
o it’s less expensive than data center computation because of lower communications, energy, and equipment cost
o many-core architectures will provide plenty of computing capacity, even on smartphones
o response time can be faster than data center computation for new collaborative natural language interfaces (à la Kinect, etc.)
• store private information in data centers that can be decrypted only using the customers’ private keys because it’s cheaper and more reliable to use multiple data center storage vendors incorporated in different countries. (For efficiency, information will be cached on customer equipment.)
• service advertising using customer equipment because advertising can be better targeted on customer equipment (without violating private information) than data centers since customer equipment has complete information as opposed to the partial information of a data center vendor
* perform social computing using customer equipment because it can be more customizable and flexible when not restricted by vendor data centers (e.g. Facebook)
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