With yesterday’s announcement of Swapdrive being acquired by Symantec, an old question occurred to me again: really, who should be responsible for your data online? Because this idea of the “cloud” and “online storage” are relatively new and under-adopted in the mainstream, a growing number of companies across the technology food chain are claiming responsibility for hosting your data online. We have Apple, Microsoft, Symantec, Adobe, EMC and others either announcing or launching respectable plays in this “space.” This is great, but it raises questions around uniformity, portability, and ownership, among other issues.

A key question is what happens when you want to take your data off of these services. On your local computer, you have full control of -and access to- your hard drive. On the web, you’re playing by someone else’s rules. How can you ensure access to all of your sensitive documents when one service goes bust? Or perhaps you don’t like the privacy rules of a particular service (Google, ahem) - you should be entitled to keep your information private, right? Given all the hubbub about “opening up” social network identity and friend information, this is a problem the online storage folks will be dealing with ten-fold two years from now when users really come around to it. We thought it was hard to load a friends list to multiple applications — try 5GB of highly confidential information!

Our answer to this: We have a fully functional and free API that enables you to import and export your data (only with your permission, of course). This means you can take your data anywhere you want, whenever you want. The best example of this is our OpenBox Services, powered by our OpenBox platform, which are third-party applications you can use directly from your Box account. We’re also eager and excited to work with standards bodies, who will, like us, advocate rights and rules for your personal information.

In the end, this should be an open conversation among all players. It has no immediate resolution, which is exciting — it continues to push us to innovate and build on the ever-present idea of “data in the cloud.”

- Aaron

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.