I'll just say this : your data is not private. Take a divorce proceeding (which is a CIVIL proceeding) from the last 5 years. Press CTRL-F, "facebook", and recoil in horror.
Basically all your cloud data will be used against you in any civil dispute in the US. So remember when you use web apps : anything you type in there is accessible to anybody who enters into a serious court case with you.
Another example : any office 365 document (esp. spreadsheets) WILL be read by the IRS if they ever decide to sue you (and you'll pay the wage of the person doing it, to make matters worse, whether or not they find any wrongdoing). Again, the evidence is plain to see in court transcripts.
And, lastly, sometimes your accounts will be compromised in petty legal disputes.
Therefore my policy is :
1) As microsoft has publicly demonstrated, they will use your hotmail stored information and use it to take action against you. If you work for a company that has a cloud platform, or a company that has a significant relationship to one of the cloud platform companies, you're taking unacceptable risks.
2) any dollar sign in any mail to me will immediately result in dead silence. I'll call you up and warn you to never do that again. If it's important enough I'll call. And if it's really important I'll drop by. Both kinds of interactions have vastly superior legal protection.
3) I will NEVER negotiate or store any contract over email, not even my freaking cell phone bill. I have them on my (encrypted) hard drive, of course, even indexed. But contracts on online services is just stupid.
Note that this behaviour is NOT illegal : the purpose here is to safeguard my personal information, which is a normal thing to do that is in fact encouraged by the relevant departments. I am trying to hide personal information from everybody and everything, which is my right.
Yes, you have that right, but I still think we're talking about different things. When you're talking about web apps, you're talking about apps hosted by Microsoft, Google, etc. I'm saying that those have their own issues, but the issues are issues with Microsoft and Google, not server-hosted applications made with HTML5, JavaScript, and PHP.
The right way to do web apps is to have something like a Debian Freedom Box, where you have your own server running free software sitting in your living room and you can access it from anywhere. Another pretty good option is to buy hosting from someone you trust with your data and run your server in their data center, preferably encrypting your data client-side before it's sent to the data center. These privacy issues you mention with Microsoft are due to using their particular implementation of web apps.
Basically all your cloud data will be used against you in any civil dispute in the US. So remember when you use web apps : anything you type in there is accessible to anybody who enters into a serious court case with you.
Another example : any office 365 document (esp. spreadsheets) WILL be read by the IRS if they ever decide to sue you (and you'll pay the wage of the person doing it, to make matters worse, whether or not they find any wrongdoing). Again, the evidence is plain to see in court transcripts.
And, lastly, sometimes your accounts will be compromised in petty legal disputes.
Therefore my policy is :
1) As microsoft has publicly demonstrated, they will use your hotmail stored information and use it to take action against you. If you work for a company that has a cloud platform, or a company that has a significant relationship to one of the cloud platform companies, you're taking unacceptable risks.
2) any dollar sign in any mail to me will immediately result in dead silence. I'll call you up and warn you to never do that again. If it's important enough I'll call. And if it's really important I'll drop by. Both kinds of interactions have vastly superior legal protection.
3) I will NEVER negotiate or store any contract over email, not even my freaking cell phone bill. I have them on my (encrypted) hard drive, of course, even indexed. But contracts on online services is just stupid.
Note that this behaviour is NOT illegal : the purpose here is to safeguard my personal information, which is a normal thing to do that is in fact encouraged by the relevant departments. I am trying to hide personal information from everybody and everything, which is my right.