RMS has been a stalwart promoter of Free Software. His take on cloud computing is that it is “worse than stupidity”. In principle, he is right; trusting someone is worse than stupidity but we humans do it all the time. Not trusting anyone is paranoia. It is possible to use IT in the real world while being paranoid but a lot less gets done, networking, for instance. We should not trust our firewalls but we do. We trust other drivers to follow the rules of the road when that trust is obviously misplaced but the reward of getting from A to B is greater than the slight risk of a collision.
In IT, the reward of having experts of our choice to manage our data and to provide other services saving costs and having less to worry about and having an overall increase in reliability far outweighs the risks in many cases. Of course there will be outrageous crimes and incidents that make the news but they will have a far lower probability than a single hard drive on a PC failing or typing a space character where it could do you harm ( I did that once, thinking rm *something but typing * something. Bad things happened.). RMS is right as usual but his warnings should not deter most of us from using services on the web. We should be careful whom we choose to provide those services but I sleep better at night knowing Google is guarding my data and fighting spam than I did when M$ watched over our PCs at work.
