Whose Data Is It Anyway?

A story on Network World linked from Slashdot discusses recent glitches with Google's hosted services. The latest problem appears to effect the Personalized Home Page service with users reporting they've lost their customisation and settings. Google have admitted a problem and are working on resolving it and hope to get people's content back but do not know if they will be able to yet.

The angle taken by Network World - and it's an important one - is that this issue and previously reported ones with Gmail, Blogger and Google Apps highlight the risks with relying on hosted application providers. The world of Web 2.0 and the increasing decentralisation of data infrastructures does bring up important questions about your data. Do you trust the provider? Do they have adequate guarantees and backups? Can you retrieve your data if you choose to move provider?

There have been a catalogue of problems with companies losing data, leaking data or otherwise having problems. But when these things occur they get a lot more press than if the computer systems of the individual companies/people involved had failed. It's partially a matter of scale in the same way that plane crashes get huge press and yet overall far more people are killed in many smaller incidents on the road. But this is no excuse for avoiding the issue of securing your data and no excuse to let these companies off the hook. Having everything in one place is a Bad Thing™ and relying completely on your application provider or data host is equally dangerous.

Back to Google. There is a professional version of Google Apps where paying a fee provides extras including basic SLA's but no guarantee's of data protection or retention. Thankfully for the more established or data-intensive applications (Calender, Spreadsheets, Blogger etc) have open API's which mean while you can take advantage of Google's expertise in web-centric applications you retain complete control over your data. And this is the key to me and something which unfortunately many commerical application hosts do not provide. Many lock away your data and you are completely at their mercy and locked-in to their system. This is not the case with Google.

Perhaps though this open approach needs to be extended to some of their other offerings, although they are already available for some of the services people have had problems with. While Google do have a responsibility for the data they host for people that does not mean those individuals can forget their own responsibility.