Hacking the cloud, eharmony, Linkedin and the perils we lead

On a day when eharmony and Linkedin have been hacked and millions of people have had their passwords and personal data stolen, it seems appropriate to raise the question: what are the risks we run by living our lives in the cloud and what property rights are we are giving up? Few people ask themselves who owns all that personal information about me on Linkedin, eharmony or indeed Facebook and what are my rights over it. 


A new book, Interop. The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems, by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, co-directors of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, asks this very question. To quote from the opening chapter of their book, 


"..... this growing level of interconnectedness comes at an increasingly high price. We make big trade-offs as we become digitally interconnected, everywhere and anytime......we are also more vulnerable in ways that are less obvious and less well understood. The same infrastructure that enables us to create, store and share information can put our privacy and security at risk.."


The authors believe the big challenge, and one which has inspired the book, is how to simultaneously create better and more useful connectivity whilst finding ways to manage the inherent risk. They argue that we rush to build information systems that enhance and enable the flow of information between individuals, organisations and systems but have not yet developed a theory of what we want out of all this interconnectivity - they call this theory interoperability or interop and hence the title of the book.


Facebook's value (whether it be $60 billion or $100 billion) is based on their ownership of your social information but if Facebook gets hacked and you lose all your friends, pictures and contacts from the cloud, what is your recourse of action? We are placing remarkable trust in these online social organisations without fully appreciating what we are sacrificing?


With Facebook fast approaching a billion users, how long will it be before regulators step in and start to rule that what Facebook owns does not properly belong to it? And then it could have a very different value.