Steve Wozniak: Data owner, tech warrior, cloud ‘worrier’

Apple’s famous co-founder, Steve Wozniak, has expressed grave doubts over cloud storage, citing privacy and knowledge ownership concerns, casting an authoritative cloud over cloud storage and information processed by cloud computing, too.

Uh-oh, cloud lovers: one of the crucial world’s foremost living technological legends, still gainfully employed by Fusion IO and still on Apple’s books as an employee, has cast his own cloud of doubt over cloud computing.

The news is surprising given Apple’s own iCloud service, not that Steve Wozniak had anything to do with developing it, promoting it or marketing it, but the concerns are legitimate: who owns what when it’s transferred to someone’s public or private cloud service?

Once it’s obtainable, is it available, despite whatever encryption technologies you could possibly use or elaborate passwords whilst you hope the cloud provider isn’t otherwise hacked, potentially exposing everyone’s data stored on that cloud?

In the course of the same week as Fusion IO’s surprise celebration for Woz , Steve also attented the second one-to-last ever airing of Mike Daisey’s controversial and somewhat disgraced one-man monologue play: The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which had momentous moments ultimately marked out as having been part fiction and only partial fact, despite Mr Daisey’s on-the-ground movements on the Foxconn factory in question.

The news comes forth via AFP , which lists plenty of detail in regards to the post-monologue chat were Wozniak and Daisey faced the group to speak and answer questions.

AFP’s report quotes Woz stating that: “I really worry about everything going to the cloud,” he said. “i believe it will be horrendous. i believe there are going to be loads of horrible problems within the next five years.”

Woz added his concerns over who owned what on cloud servers, stating that: “With the cloud, you do not own anything. You already signed it away” during the legalistic terms of service with a cloud provider that computer users must comply with.”

Woz then spoke like a freedom-loving individual when he stated “I desire to feel that I own things”, with AFP’s quote of Wozniak concluding with “A lot of individuals feel, ‘Oh, everything is absolutely on my computer,’ but I say the more we transfer everything onto the internet, onto the cloud, the fewer we are going to have control over it.”

For plenty more on and of the comments Steve Wozniak made, please read the AFP’s article here .