The insidious creep of property theft.

The premise which has it that computing’s Cloud exists for users’ convenience is fundamentally flawed. The goal of the Cloud is to wrest control of the user’s data from his local disk storage to the vendor’s storage on his disks. That data can then be examined and parsed without the owner’s knowledge, hacked and resold for profit. The user’s convenience has nothing to do with it. Google Reader is a perfect example of this realization dawning on one of America’s biggest businesses.

If you believe that, then you are naïve. Google is discontinuing its RSS aggregator to force users to migrate to Google+, where Google can collect and resell your web behavior to all at sundry, and tough if you don’t know about it. It’s their competitor for the no less disingenuous Facebook. And while these vendors are selling everything about you, you pay for the privilege with inflated phone bills so that they can distribute your data free of charge, while proclaiming such utter nonsense as ‘net neutrality’ and ‘information wants to be free’. That they continue to do so, successfully at that, says more about consumers than I want to contemplate.

Like most Google ‘free’ products, Reader had one of the poorest user interfaces it’s possible to imagine. That fired entrepreneurial spirits and great front ends to Reader’s database like NetNewsWire and Reeder came along and provided an exceptional user experience. Because much of an RSS feed was downloaded by these products, the experience without fast wi-fi was excellent for subsequent reading. You may not have been able to get at the full story fast, but you got the crux of it and you got that immediately.

But with Reader being discontinued on June 30, you must migrate to a new product unless you prefer to have your identity appropriated and resold by Google.

Thus I have tried a couple of alternatives. Feedly seemed promising but on some of my machines it refuses to import my (many) Google Reader feeds. That makes it essentially useless – as useless as trying to get Apple’s iCloud to synch Bookmarks in Safari across many devices. I wrote enthusiastically about Feedly a while back but I was wrong owing to this debilitating error. For the life of me, I cannot find a fix in their help pages.

More recently I have tried the ridiculously named Inoreader. It imported my Google Reader feeds fine but access is slow and the product is useless without wi-fi. The interface does not compare with NetNewsWire or Reeder, but those two services are seemingly silent on what they will do after June 30, 2013 passes, and Google Reader disappears.

More fool me for having used Google Reader in the first place, disregarding my own instincts about this business.

I suppose complaining about the Cloud is rather like Canute trying to reverse the waves, but I’m sure he was pretty miffed when the royal toes got soaked, and I am no less upset.

Every place I now go on the internet comes with loud demands that I join Facebook, or Google+ or any one of many other ‘social’ sites. I do not want to be ‘social’. I prefer to choose my own friends, not have them chosen for me. When I tried Twitter a while back my feed was inundated with messages from strangers of no interest to me. I quickly closed the account, though it was not easy to do. I constantly get messages from Linkedin users who want to share their profile with me. Why would I care about a stranger’s job aspirations? As for Facebook, well, I haven’t the faintest interest in exchanging images of my latest tattoo or dog with all and sundry and I certainly do not wish to hang out with a bunch of 10 year olds using US public school grammar. I want solid, hard information reliably delivered, information whose sources I choose. I want it fast and I do not want my profile being resold by my friendly Cloud provider.

And I also want to own my software (and forget those probably illegal agreements – with software, possession is ownership in my book, and I do not need your permission to use something I have paid for), not becoming a slave of the likes of Adobe who now insist I pay rent to access the latest versions of Photoshop in …. yes, you guessed it, the Cloud. Once I cease paying rent I may still have access to my locally stored images, but if they are in the wrong file format, I may no longer be able to process them. Why would anyone agree to that or be forced to adopt workarounds by storing in DNG or TIFF?

And if you believe one word of what a Facebook or a Google says about your security well, frankly you deserve one another. Here’s a search of the NYT on two comically contradictory words:

Facebook security

My advice to you? Close your Facebook account and cease being a marketable product. And view everything Google does with the most intense suspicion. You are a product to be sold. You are not the customer. Their advertiser is. And fight the Cloud with all your might to keep your data in your home, not on remote servers. Finally, for heaven’s sake, do not cave and sign up for Photoshop in the cloud. You do not need the latest purported features and your money is better spent on a standalone product whose entrepreneurial creator can use the capital and will allow you to retain future processing access to your pictures.

The future of NetNewsWire and Reeder:

Neither of these messages make me optimistic: