"Hey Brandon, we found your car's registration in the ski resort parking lot," said the letter.
Last week, a stranger picked up my car's registration from a parking lot at a ski resort. Someone from northern Kentucky had been kind enough to pick it up and mail it to my apartment, but the embarrassment was real. Still is. I'd forgotten to put my sticker on the license plate, and had procrastinated until I was leaving the slopes for the day to put it on, must have set the paper down after I removed the sticker, and the wind probably carried it away.
Doesn't matter exactly how it happened, just that it did, and the kindness of strangers saved the day. Humans can be so great sometimes. It's awesome when there's nothing preventing people from doing something gracious, and they choose to volunteer their energy to do that.
But beyond the kindness of strangers, there's an important point to be made. It's obviously not good for my registration to be in the hands of strangers, and it's certainly not good in the parking lot of a ski resort. My personal data and belongings should stay close to me, and I should do what I can to avoid having that kind of information moving around and passing between hands.
Avoiding Network Hops
In historic firefighting, a "bucket brigade" was a team of firefighters who would line up next to a water source with a large number of buckets and make a chain of bucket-passers to the fire. Each individual in the chain would receive a bucket of water from the person before them and pass it quickly to the person next in line, until the water arrived at the fire. At this point, the person at the end of the line would throw the water on the fire and then receive the next bucket. The plus side of this was that the water could move faster than someone running back and forth. The downside was that with each pass between people, some water would be spilled in haste, and by the time the bucket arrived at the destination, much of the original content would be missing.
Imagine this with your data. You upload a photograph to a website. In our case, we're not concerned about the loss of data, but more concerned with what we don't know - who all is in the line for that bucket? Who can take a look at our photograph? How do you know? There's modern technology to make sure that your target audience receives the photo, but very little in place to prevent them from selling your data or (more and more frequently) using it to train AI. It's much more secure if it only makes one network hop, and only one audience receives it.
A Secure Solution
Since using any cloud is just renting someone else's computer, there's a simple solution to a lot of this. For one, avoid uploading and sharing your data. Still getting emails from that silly sock subscription you signed up for in 2012? You should probably delete the account (not the emails). Storing all your treasured memories on a cloud provider? Might want to save those to a hard drive and stop paying for that subscription. Stashed all your passwords in a Google spreadsheet? Stop reading this article, find someplace non-digital to store those, and delete that file!
Here's my idea: your data should stay as close to you as possible - not in a ski resort parking lot, not being passed from place to place, but ideally in your home entirely. No cloud, no network hops, no sharing with strangers. You don't need to put your passwords on the internet to use them.
I got lucky due to the kindness of strangers. Big cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft don't really have the incentive to be kind. I got my data back, but my information on the internet doesn't always come back home. It's better to keep my data - and my car's registration - where it belongs, and to not let it wander in the first place.