Open Monologue
Just because I'm making it up as I go along doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing

I have been known to be exuberant about the use of Google Docs, having presented about Google Docs at conferences and worked with classes for getting set up to use Google Docs. I’m not going to give up my love for Google but it is tempered when I read articles like this – Google Docs suffer privacy glitch (which happened back in March. Just goes to show how much I pay attention to the world):

Though the documents were shared only with people whom the Google Docs users had already shared documents, rather than with the world at large, the problem illustrates one downside of cloud computing, in which Internet servers host software previously run on a person’s own computer. The flip side of a cloud-computing advantage, that a person can get access to those documents from any Internet-connected computer or smartphone, is that technical problems or hacking attempts also can expose private information.

And this is the problem that some IT managers will point out about cloud computing. When our data is out there, we lose a great deal of control over access. We are at the mercy of the services that look after our data for us, not only their privacy policies but also their technical reliability. If a company as large as Google can make an error like this, it should make everyone think carefully about what sort of information we put online even in mostly secure services.