• Financial Times, Friday, January 4, 2008 10:48 AM

Google and Microsoft have shared their vision of the computing "cloud," an endless swath of computing power that makes it possible for all of our information to be stored on the Web rather than inside crash-prone PCs. The "cloud" would never crash, as information would be distributed across a mass of machines operating in perfect harmony.

Sounds amazing, right? Wrong: "Taken to its logical conclusion, the world would be left with no more than a handful of 'computers', each one a massively powerful distributed network built and managed by some deep-pocketed corporation," a report warns. Which means big technological safeguards would need to be implemented in order to protect consumer privacy--and maybe even freedom.

Consumers should retain full ownership of their data, for instance. But imagine if all that information were stored on a handful of computers and it fell into the wrong hands. Meanwhile, other safeguards would be necessary to protect the cloud itself.

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