Big Brother Is In Your Spotify: How Music Became the Surveillance State’s Trojan Horse

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/how-music-became-surveillance-states-trojan-horse




Here’s how the surveillance state consolidates control: Living in “the cloud” — where all our pertinent data is stored on computer servers operated by the likes of Google and Amazon and Microsoft — becomes too seductive to avoid and too cheap not to afford.

On Tuesday, Google offered fresh new support for Moore’s Law, the hoary thesis that the price of computer processing power and storage will relentlessly plummet. At a San Francisco event called “Google Cloud Platform Live,” the company announced sweeping price cuts for a wide array of cloud computing services. Of particular interest to anyone on the lookout for a cheap backup storage plan: Google is now charging a mere $9.99 a month for a full terabyte of storage. A terabyte! That’s a great deal.

Or at least it was, for about 24 hours. Because on Wednesday, Amazon matched the cuts, drastically slashing its own prices for storage and access to computing power. As the inevitable price wars continue, consumers are swiftly going to reach the point where they don’t even bother calculating the cost/benefit algebra of moving to the cloud. It will simply be too cheap to matter.

This migration will continue even in the face of the obvious privacy and surveillance concerns associated with storing your data outside the security of your own offline hard drives. Sure, the Snowden revelations about government snooping mean that in the short term, U.S. cloud companies are having a hard time drumming up business from customers who don’t want the NSA watching every move. But it’s hard to see this as anything more than just a bump in the road; the price and convenience advantages of living in the cloud are too seductive to ignore.

[sendero]

1. You can buy...

....a 1TB USB drive (fully self contained) for $60. $10 a month is hardly a great deal. "Cloud" storage is for dummies.

[hobbit709]

2. You got it.

I have close to 10 Tb in external storage drives. There are at least two copies of all my data on separate drives, plus the copies of the data on my computer. Flash drives are getting real cheap too. Saw a 128 Gb USB 3.0 flash drive for $60($50 with the mail-in rebate) the other day.

The only data I have in the cloud is some pictures in my photobucket account.

[woo me with science]

3. kick and rec.