Other than folks who use open office and Linux, cloud AI is being fed by the private information from every available source. I, of course, take the open source office apps and Linux without the cloud backups, as I have for decades now. But anyone who is looking the other way should probably change their tune at this point.
What are the options and what do they do?
Popular options for things like documents, spreadsheets, slides, etc. are Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Open Office (and variants).
- Google is all cloud-based on their cloud, where they use it for their AI.
- Apple has local versions, but is such a decreasing part of the market it doesn’t really matter in terms of desktops and servers.
- Microsoft has been cloud focused for several years and is now essentially eliminating anything that does not copy to their cloud infrastructure.
- OpenOffice and related systems offer some cloud capabilities, but are essentially all local on the system using them – except…
- Windows forces cloud stuff for most things, including backups and updates and so forth. You cannot even turn it on without it slowing you down to force the cloud on you.
- Apple is the walled garden which also forces you to their cloud for lots of things including licensing for most stuff pretty often.
- Android is increasingly cloud forced and in most mobile platforms forces these things.
- Linux (server and desktop) can run pretty much independently but tries to force updates unless you refuse or turn it off. Some versions offer cloud backups, but none yet force the office suites to the cloud.
What about government and industry cooperation?
Since shortly after 9/11, the US government (and likely lots of others who previously didn’t) have the right to force access without disclosure from cloud providers. Big data feeding AI through the major providers means that all of the content, privileged medical and legal information, government records, private conversations over online meetings, emails and text messages, databases, and now documents of all sorts, are grist for the mill of surveillance, automated analysis, AI surveillance, and generative AI.
Conclusions
If you are going to maintain any control over or confidentiality of your content, you will have to move to open source and use Linux operating environments with local storage. Same with databases as far as I can tell. But you can still install Linux on cloud servers and have relative control over the content on those servers if you don’t use the shared backup or database systems or push all your data to AI or other similar services.