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Did you hear that the NSA tracks, reads, listens and records nearly everything you do on “The Cloud”? Of course you did, thanks to Edward Snowden who’s opened the eyes of the world to just how massive the Republican/Democrat Regime’s surveillance state has become. It’s been widely reported that the government gets easy access to the servers and data and tracking from all the biggest publicly-traded major US Internet companies including Microsoft, AOL, Google, Apple, Verizon, Facebook, and so on.
As a result of these worldwide revelations and the shock amongst many individuals, I’ve seen many articles since then proclaiming the “Death of the Cloud” as consumers and companies start to question how much of their data, information and knowledge they want to put out on the Cloud that NSA is monitoring every step of the way. Those articles have a point. There has been a marked pushback on new order growth from major companies who are pausing their move to the Cloud. But you have to Flip It once again. Is there any stopping the movement to the Cloud? The convenience of having all your data, information and records including photos, videos, chats, emails, texts, music, subscriptions and so on outweighs the risks for the vast majority of Internet users. At least for now.
But billions of people will be coming online in the next decade, and without having already been locked in to one of the big US Internet service providers, why wouldn’t they go ahead and go with something a little more trustworthy?
A few years ago I created a company called RevolutioNetwork.com and one of the sites and services we were building was all about guaranteeing anonymity for anybody on the network, including creating a “Virtual Private Network” that automatically turned on when you logged into the network. I ended up getting a TV show on Fox Business as we were just getting rolling on the company and by the time I’d left TV we’d moved on to other, less grandiose projects like WallStreetAllStars.com which had much lower costs and higher profitability.
There’s a HUGE opportunity for a new phase of Internet service providing that is completely focused upon privacy and anonymity and fighting against government tracking from any state, including the US.
So, is the Cloud over? From Oracle and EMC to so many equipment and infrastructure companies have been seeing 50% plus annual growth in Cloud-related sales. And while there very well could be a blowback, especially over the long-term, against these giant consumer-focused tech companies that have sold out their customers to a surveillance state, the infrastructure companies will find new growth partners who will win all that new business and slowly cut into the existing customer base of the traitor companies.
I used “The Cloud” to type this article. I use the Cloud to check my gmail. I used the Cloud to FaceTime with my wife. I use the Cloud to educate myself with videos, books and articles. I’m never going back to local storage. The government also has all kinds of access to your credit card and debit card spending, your savings and checking account information. Visa, Mastercard and the Too Big Too Fail banks haven’t exactly been vocal about letting us know our privacy is protected there.
Privacy is going to be a huge growth industry in coming years and will eventually provide us with some great alternative investment opportunities when the next generation of privacy-focused Internet service providers come public.