John Battelle Quotes

The cloud is still really just a bunch of servers, owned by someone or something, whose decisions and competence must be trusted. This applies to everything from Google Docs to Gmail: Putting our data out there really means putting it 'out there.'

In the U.S., you even lose legal rights if you store your data in a company's machines instead of your own. The police need to present you with a search warrant to get your data from you; but if they are stored in a company's server, the police can get it without showing you anything. They may not even have to give the company a search warrant.

As much as we can, we want to prevent people from having to think about how to keep and share their stuff.

It's high time for a fresh European alternative to enter the market, taking the existing Internet behemoths head on. What the world needs now is a cloud storage service that is not subject to uncontrolled access by intelligence agencies.

In the US, you even lose legal rights if you store your data in a company's machines instead of your own. The police need to present you with a search warrant to get your data from you; but if they are stored in a company's server, the police can get it without showing you anything.

Government and businesses cannot function without enormous amounts of data, and many people have to have access to that data.

When documents were analog, they were protected by government laws against unreasonable search and seizure. When they live in the cloud... the ground is shifting.

Cloud services cut both ways in terms of security: you get off-site backup and disaster recovery, but you entrust your secrets to somebody else's hands. Doing the latter increases your exposure to government surveillance and the potential for deliberate or inadvertent breaches of your confidential files.

Remember, the Cloud is just someone else's server.

In the post-Snowden world, you need to enable others to build their own cloud and have mobility of applications. That's both because of the physicality of computing - where the speed of light still matters - and because of geopolitics.

The enterprise cloud is a very secure cloud at this point.

Let them know precisely what you are going to do with their data

Apple knows a lot of data. Facebook knows a lot of data. Amazon knows a lot of data. Microsoft used to, and still does with some people, but in the newer world, Microsoft knows less and less about me. Xbox still knows a lot about people who play games. But those are the big five, I guess.

Information agencies operate in an industry that values data. Restricted access to information is what makes it valuable.

If 300 million people were to offer up the details of their private lives, you would need to hire another 300 million people just to keep up.

Dropbox looks really simple to the end user and is extremely magical and just works. But under the hood, the complexity of the technology is huge. The amount of work it requires to store, scale and move this data is pretty intense.

When you live in a networked environment, it's possible to separate data from applications.

We created the ability for people to insert enterprise or personal data.

You can't talk about big data without talking about things like privacy and ownership.

Whether it's Facebook or Google or the other companies, that basic principle that users should be able to see and control information about them that they themselves have revealed to the companies is not baked into how the companies work. But it's bigger than privacy. Privacy is about what you're willing to reveal about yourself.

Small businesses were slower than large businesses in adopting broadband. One of the reasons was they were concerned with putting their customer lists online or in the cloud.

I believe people have a right to know what's going on with their information and how it's collected, how it's stored and who gets it.

Anytime Facebook wants to change how it might use all that data about you, in any way, across any service it has within the Facebook ecosystem, all it has to do is change one privacy policy, tell you about it, and that's that.

Many well-meaning attempts to address public concern about privacy reflect an outdated understanding of the contemporary data ecosystem.

If the government can manage to collect and release personal information in a secure and useful way, so can private companies, which will empower consumers to become better shoppers.