If you ask your grandma what a cloud is, she will tell you that it’s a white and fluffy thing in the sky. In the tech world, too, the cloud is a great concept: You can upload your pictures to a big cloud castle in the sky that keeps them nice and safe. Always there, ready for you whenever and wherever you need it.
I love to rely on the cloud. It gives peace of mind to believe that someone is taking care of my most personal information, without having to worry about backing up a disk.
When we start using a cloud, we click accept and start using its convenience for free, but one day, we receive a ransom note (an email) saying that our storage is full. Either we keep paying monthly to keep both the space and the access to our data available. Or we don’t pay, and our access to our most sensitive and valuable data gets restricted. We don’t just lose the service of storing our images, we lose the access to our memories, our records, our work… The bubble pops and we understand the reality of the cloud: It’s huge warehouses, somewhere far away, in a cold place that will keep the computers from overheating.
Eventually, we pay and start renting our life back. The only way we can access our own data is through a middleman and a monthly fee. The relationship between us and the company changes. Suddenly, they are holding our personal data, and we have to pay our way back.
By uploading our photos to the cloud, we are handing over the sovereignty of our data to a company. Google, Amazon and Microsoft (“the big three”) currently hold around 63% of the market share of cloud infrastructure, and when we use them, we trust them blindly.
These companies are not just “renting out” their storage space for normal consumers. When we use clouds, they double tax us. They earn from our subscription fees, and also from using our data to improve their algorithms, their AI models, etc. (Some companies say that they “anonymize” personal data, but there is no way of knowing.) Their business improves, and they earn even more. In Scott Galloway’s Book “The Four,” he argues that the big tech companies “[…] are in a race to become the operating system for our lives. The prize? A frictionless existence that we pay for with our data, our privacy, and eventually, our agency.”
In November 2025, Amazon and Google announced that their cloud services were starting an Interconnect partnership. It was marketed as a victory for “multi-cloud” convenience, but by linking their infrastructures, these giants have ensured that our data stays within their combined ecosystems. The partnership will make it even harder for us to track who really has access to our data and to withdraw it.
We can argue that clouds are similar to banks. They keep our valuables safe, and they use them for their own investments, right?
In October, an eight-hour outage of the Amazon Cloud services (AWS) affected more than 17 million users across more than 60 countries, according to Ookla Research, costing companies across the US millions of dollars.If banks lose your money, you are protected through deposit insurance.When data gets lost by a cloud, there’s no way to recover it – it’s gone.If we want to switch banks, we can close our account and go to another one.
But “data gravity” prevents us from simply exiting the cloud. As the amount of our data on the cloud grows, it pulls us deeper into the company’s convenient ecosystem. From there, it’s a spiral. The more data you have, the more convenient the cloud is and the harder it is to leave.Removing your data becomes a technical difficulty.
This data concentration on a few tech giants has given them more power than some countries have. They can change the terms of service and raise prices. We, the users, have nowhere else to go, because when it comes to handling digital data, there aren’t enough laws to protect us. We might think that we know how to use these tools, but we can only see the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how the companies use our data.
In December 2025, Time magazine named “Architects of AI” as the person of the year. If we want to keep using advanced tech in 2026, we need to look further than convenience. We need to find solutions that we believe in, to escape the spider web of data. By installing a home cloud — storage we control — we can take back the power from the companies and return to being the true owners of our data. We can take back our sovereignty over our own digital life.
This was informative to know about. Thank you
ReplyDeleteWhich is why I own a lot of USB's.
ReplyDeleteYou don’t need the cloud for backup and storage. For about $100 you can buy a 250 TB SSD external drive and save your info there instead of renting from Microsoft.
ReplyDelete