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A warning sign on the way to digital utopia
Here's a cautionary tale for the digital age. A couple of years ago I was clicking around a website I ran at the time and was surprised to find that several dozen images were missing: I mean the files themselves were just GONE, having disappeared from the server.
I got in touch with the company that hosted the site. Since they were reluctant at first to take a look, I contacted management and got them to address the issue. These were important images - irreplaceable, some of them - and I wanted them found.
Long story short, the company never found the images. Seems that they were accidentally deleted in a server update of some sort. The company apologized profusely, but nothing else - no compensation, no usage credit. They didn't have to, since the terms of use of their service were all in their favor. I don't use their service any more, but I did learn an important lesson: while I may allow another company to store my data, I'm still responsible for it.
This came to mind when I read about Apple's recent problematic launch of Mobile Me, in which the email of thousands of customers disappeared from their accounts. As far as I can tell, Apple has now resolved the issue - see this post - but it took some time, and a lot of customer complaints and bad press, to activate Apple to go public, take responsibility, and fix it.
And then I saw the story of this user, who was locked out of his Google account: no access to his Gmail, Google docs, or his photos - all disabled by Google, for (initially) no apparent reason. It all turned out OK, but it underscores a lesson about how these relationships are structured.
We're increasingly dependent on technology companies to manage our bits. And I mean FULLY dependent. For a given file, we rely 100% on a single company to provide that file, on demand, whenever we ask - and to store it safely until the next time we ask for it.
This is different from other areas of our life, where we rely on a system of providers. If I need to fly to San Francisco, I rely on the airline industry to get me there. If one airline stops flying, I can still get to SF with another provider... yes, with some delays, but I'll get the service I need from someone else.
That's not the case with our digital lives. If your Gmail account is disabled, you'll need Google's help to get back on. There's no one else you can go to for help.
I don't think any of this is a problem, as long as users are aware of how these relationships work. And that brings us to liability.
Any airline is liable for certain aspects of your customer experience. Basic needs must be met - arriving alive, getting your luggage - or they'll pay. They're legally bound.
This is not the case with most consumer-oriented technology services. Read the terms of use for any site you rely on, and try to find the company's legal liability if it loses your data or delays your account access. It's not there.
And when a company isn't legally liable, it can be difficult to motivate them to fix your problem.
Here's an example: Amazon.com, which I generally like, recently lost the ninety-or-so customer reviews of my book Bit Literacy. Check the book page and note, "No customer reviews yet." (Update: Eight hours after I posted this column, the reviews reappeared on the book page. Thanks to whoever at Amazon finally got it done.) As the vast majority of the reviews were very positive, their departure certainly affected sales.
My staff has been emailing Amazon since the problem occurred, and the best we've gotten back is something to the effect of "we'll try to resolve your issue within two to three business days." We're now on Day 26, and they still don't know where the reviews are.
If I was one of a thousand authors suffering from this problem, the New York Times would pick up the story and the bad press would activate Amazon into fixing it. Or if the reviews had disappeared from, say, a Harry Potter book page, you can bet Jeff Bezos would be on the phone with the engineers in a heartbeat. But a single, non-celebrity user suffering this issue does not a press story make; and so I wait (or rather waited for 26 days).
I want to point this out because this can happen to you, too, with any email, any photo, any file, ANY data that isn't sitting on a hard drive within arm's reach. So beware of the bits you send into the cloud. I support the idea of using these services, just as long as users understand the risk they run by ceding all control, and none of the liability, to a third-party company.
I don't mean this as a criticism. Most technology companies are well-meaning. They're adding value to the marketplace, often with services provided at no charge. It's a good deal. It's just that, when (not if) something goes wrong with the technology, the user generally has no leverage on the company to get attention. Unless you're a celebrity or one of thousands of angry customers, you're unlikely to get much more than a "sorry, we just can't find your files."
The key is to be aware. To reword that important life lesson: if you want any important data stored right, you'd better back it up yourself.
P.S. I should mention that the hot new buzzword in Silicon Valley is "cloud computing." Get ready for a slew of articles on this in the next year, announcing the new techno-utopia we'll enjoy when we give all our data, all the time, to technology companies to mediate for us. Do you think legal liability will get a mention?
The cloud is still a single point of failure. If we treat it as such, we'd be a lot safer.
Not too long ago, I had lost everything in my gmail account and Google was completely unresponsive to my pleas to recover my data. They never did. Now I archive my critical emails in another account. Despite losing my emails, I still use gmail because it's so darn easy to use.
This issue is especially focused on FREE services. SaaS providers are legally liable for the backup and maintenance of your data via a contract. This brings to mind the old adage - There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Amazon also lost the reviews on my book.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1438263430/severenetA
Most annoying.
Bummer that Amazon has lost your reviews, Mark. I posted this to my Facebook profile to help generate some Harry Potter-esque buzz. ;)
Mark,
I'm curious how you feel about in this subject in regard to your own cloud offering, Gootodo. I'm sure many of your power-users would be thrown for a loop if their to-do list data disappeared. Could you take a stand to make Gootodo an example for safe, reliable, guaranteed cloud computing?
Philip - very good question about Gootodo.com. As for losing data - thankfully, that's not happened yet, but we have the standard sort of terms of use in place. For me to *guarantee* reliability, I'd have to build out a LOT more infrastructure - which would raise the cost considerably. I'm open to it, if and when customers demand it (and are willing to pay a lot more than three bucks a month).
Meantime, I try to distinguish our service level in other ways. Whenever a user emails in about a problem, I try to get them a response (from the team or me personally) immediately. If we make a mistake, we try to acknowledge it and apologize for it ASAP, and of course get right to work on a fix.
The one time to date that we had a system-wide issue, where people couldn't get into their accounts for a few hours, we did all of the above *and* offered compensation for anyone who wanted it... *and* we built out more hardware to avoid that problem in the future. Thankfully, it hasn't yet happened again.
Incidentally, Gootodo is here: https://www.gootodo.com
What if all our information disappeared? There will be a "Perfect Storm" on the internet. How it will happen will be from different groups acting alone but all contributing one part of the puzzle. Back up everything.
Presumably an answer could be a LCKSS approach (lots of copies keeps stuff safe). Any suggestions for the best way to do this with gmail? Have it autoforward a copy of every inbox item to another account? But then what about sent mail (could bcc self each time)?
Technology Companies in the internet do as they please. Case in point yahoo photos.
I was a happy user of yahoo photos and had over 1600 photos on the site. they decided to shut down the site and offered to move all my photos to any of a number of sites, I choose flickr. it turns out that they gave me a premium account for free for the first few months. now I can oly access the last 200, the other 1400 are still there but I'll have to sign up for the premium package.
I'm o.k. with having to pay for additional services, *when they tell you upfront*, but this was a scheme (as far as I'm concerned) to charge customers for a service that previously was FREE. I'm using Picasa now, and I'm very happy with it. The upload utility is the easiest I've seen ever.
I won't even shop at Amazon anymore after an experience with them showed me that not only do they not care about offering decent customer service, but they're also fine with knowingly displaying faulty information on their products, otherwise known as false advertising. That was almost a year ago, and they haven't received a penny from me since, whereas I used to be a regular customer. So it doesn't surprise me how they're treating you. All I can hope for is that someday people become more aware of what kind of company Amazon really is and retailers pull their products to avoid being associated with such a company.
Interesting story. Do you know if any businesses have sprung up to handle this problem--especially the Google one?
While you can obviously manually and locally back up your Google information by downloading into another mail account via pop access, perhaps a quick and easy way for users (that included all of the other Google data as well and remained in "the cloud") would be popular.
You know how when you sign up for Twitter or LinkedIn, you can give these companies access to your Google account to pull in contact info?
If the company was highly trusted for its security, highly secure with extra encryption, you could provide it with your login info to all of your accounts where important data is stored, and it could easily and quickly back it up across multiple servers in a way that almost entirely "blinds" the data from anyone but you. Amazon, Flickr and others have open APIs for grabbing this data--and for your web host, you would just give your trusted backup company your FTP and database access information.
It seems like companies like Amazon and Google would be motivated to facilitate some type of relationship with a company like this, too, so they don't have to deal with the headache of angry customers and bad pr, and such a company could, through this facilitation, easily put your lost data back into your Google or Amazon account.
--Evan
I don't know of any such services available today, but they'll surely arrive - and be very profitable - once more people suffer data loss online.
I would love nothing more than to see Amazon held accountable for their endless, fruitless maze on customer non-service. It's appalling what they get away with, in the era of getsatisfaction.com. I guess there's still no major competitor for them, 13 years and counting... unbelievable.
I've always been opposed to the adoption of thin clients for this reason. If everything's in the cloud, when the cloud isn't there -- and it won't be there for every reason from your line got cut accidentally outside your door, to someone has removed your part of the cloud for some corporate excuse ("liability reasons" or "the new management no longer views this as a priority"), to evildoers have brought the whole Internet down -- a part of or your whole digital life isn't there, from a few minutes to forever.
At any rate, with a thin client you could end up with nothing accessible and nothing to do -- just like in the bad old dinosaur days of mainframes and draconian, Soviet-style data centers.
Isn't that what personal computers are about: every person with a computer is their own server and nothing short of physically taking it away from them or malware can remove what they have.
My biggest and, I hope, baroque worry is that a vast online resource like Amazon or IMDB or the Wikipedia will just be gone one morning. "Sorry, we ran out of money and we had no other choice." There's no way for us to back them up.
What do you mean when you refer to yourself as a "non-celebrity?'
In my opinion, anyone who has their book listed on the Personal MBA list of best business books is a celebrity. See http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/
Google does not back up your email or anything else you store with them. They rely entirely on replication. However, a software bug or admin error can wipe out your data - then replication replicates that deletion to all the replicated copies.
This is why I still use Outlook. My email, stays on my PC (and incidentally is not harvested for advertising).
Just a few months back, Steve Portigal wrote an interesting "object obituary" on the loss of his Flickr account. His photos were backed up; but all the related meta-data -- descriptions, comments, tags, friend connections, etc. -- were lost. This is a case where I believe it's not even possible to back up yourself.
http://www.portigal.com/blog/object-obituary-my-flickr-meta-content/
Perhaps social services could provide the meta-data in a downloadable form?
For those who are asking about a gmail backup, you can enable your gmail account to support POP3 and/or IMAP. Once you do this, you can use Outlook or Mail, or whatever mail client you want, to keep a copy of all your gmail mail on a PC or Mac somewhere.
This is free and easy to do (just log in to gmail and go to 'Settings' and then 'Forwarding and POP/IMAP' to enable and get instructions for your mail client.
That way you have offline access as well - for laptop or dial-up users, etc.
The cloud should not be a single point of failure. The whole point of a 'cloud' is LCKSS approach (lots of copies keeps stuff safe) as Mark points out.
You can use many new web apps this way, here are two examples:
I use GMail and access it via the web, via my iPhone, and via my laptop using Mail. At any given time, Google has a complete copy of all my mail, my laptop has a copy of all my mail since the last synch, and my iPhone has copies of all recent messages since my last synch. This is pretty safe.
I use Evernote to manage all the other bits of information, notes, links, web pages, etc. that I may need. At any given time, Evernote has all my info, I run the client software on my laptop and have a complete copy of the data, and I can still access the info on my iPhone or via the web from anywhere.
This is how it should be - and is, in many cases.
I would be surprised if most providers did not keep backups of the data. Storage and backup technology has become very cheap. However, this does not mean that they can't lose your data in an extreme case.
I live in Spain and have had exactly one problem with Amazon (both .co.uk and .com) in the last 12 years. They sent me a manual without its CD-Rom. I complained, they sent a new one and told me to donate other copy to a a school or charity. Nothing bad to say about them.