Free Services Are Unaccountable Stewards
Is your information important to you? Your email? Your contacts? Your conversation histories?
GMail, Yahoo!Mail, Hotmail, and other free web-based email services are free. They also are contentious. Being so, they don't save secret copies of your email.
This week, Google had a glitch and it nuked the email of about 60 Gmail account holders.
Here's Google's note to Techcrunch, explaining the issue:
We saw your post today about Gmail and wanted to let you know what was going on.
Regretfully, a small number of our users — around 60 — lost some or all of their email received prior to December 18th. Once we found out about this issue, we worked day and night to confirm that only a few accounts were affected and to do whatever we could to restore as much of the users’ accounts as we could. We’ve also reached out to the people who were affected to apologize and to work with them to restore the email from any personal backup they might have.
We know how important Gmail is to our users – we use it ourselves for our corporate email. We have extensive safeguards in place to protect email stored with Gmail and we are confident that this is a small and isolated incident.
In the Web 2.0 world, we put a lot of our important information in the hands of benevolent strangers. They operate according to the whims of funding, bugs, advertisers, worms, security holes, and the Department of Homeland Security (or local equivalent).
At any time, your personal information is at risk when using these systems. It's up to you to measure that level of risk.
I use typepad because I can download an OPML file of my blog at any time and save it. I try to do this quarterly.
Typepad and SixApart are bang-up people, I truly trust them. But Fate ... well, she's a different girl altogether. And even with backups, Typepad has been known to lose a day or two there. Not because they are negligent or stupid - but because that's how computers work.
Some things I have to just trust. My del.icio.us information or my network in LinkedIn are entirely unprotected from loss. And I rely on them.
When Ed Vielmetti's laptop broke in October, he arrived at my doorstep heavy in a state of withdrawal. I loaned him one of my laptops and watched the life seep back into him. The color returned to his face, he stopped hyperventilating ... but that was just net access. (Slight exaggerations, mine.)
One of the things Ed told me he was most reliant on was his del.icio.us links. What if someone developed a del.icio.us worm that ate the whole database? Or even just Ed's account? For Ed, Ed's account is really important.
In the terms of service, no one promises to save your data from harm - ever. So, don't blame Gmail if you lose your vital information. You choose your level of risk.
Blogged from the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Washington
Image borrowed from DnDAdventure.
I compare the resources I have to do backups on my own personally owned equipment and compare that with the people responsible for the same problems at The Yahoo and The Google and figure it better be them to do the work, not me.
There are files of mine that have been online continuously now for 15 years (at ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/emv/ , last change dates 1991) which has to mean at least five generations of physical hardware changes to keep them going. Anything I have that's digital that has survived for any length of time has done so because the media its on has been replaced by someone else. (Yes, I still have 5.25" floppies from the 1980s that I hope to read some time, and I'm betting I will never get any data from them.)
As to losing the laptop, yeah, it was traumatic, sort of like losing a big piece of my brain (but still needing to have it around to get my day done). Thanks for your loaner.
It makes me think about what it must have been like to have a whole society offline as happened in the recent Taiwan earthquake.
Posted by: Edward Vielmetti | 29 December 2006 at 22:21
Yes, but ... in cases like this one they specifically do not archive your information.
I've never lost anything from my hotmail account, either. The chance of data loss happening is small - but the pain great.
So we extend more than a bit of risk.
Posted by: Jim Benson | 29 December 2006 at 22:50