[cliveholloway]

"I have little compassion for people who store their files in the cloud only."

That's all well and good, but what about the other 95% of the population that just want to pay someone to host their files?

Why should consumers have to know the best technical solution? All they want is to pay for a solution to a problem.

[tomflack]

You can change your last sentence to be about anything a consumer buys though.

"Why should consumers have to know the healthy food? All they want is to pay for a solution to their hunger."

"Why should consumers have to know which cars have good gas mileage? All they want is to pay for a form of transport."

Because there are advantages to consumers in being knowledgeable about what they buy. Like knowing your cloud storage isn't (and can never be) perfectly reliable.

[cliveholloway]

I don't care how cars work, I trust the mechanic to fix the problem.

I don't care how the financial markets work - I trust my 401k to pay for my retirement.

Life is far too short for me to want to know about things that don't interest me. One of the points of an advanced society is that we can pay people to do things for us.

People shouldn't have to second guess every professional service they use. Maybe it's time to add legal guarantees to the cloud?

[kiiski]

"Maybe it's time to add legal guarantees to the cloud?"

So... Lets make it illegal for a site to lose your data by being shut down by the FBI? Seriously though, is it really a good idea to make more (artificial and unsolvable) problems for cloud service providers to worry about?

[im3w1l]

Better idea: Lets make it illegal for FBI to lose your data by shutting down a site.

[borism]

that's alright, but don't whine when your car breaks down in the middle of a desert or you find out you're below poverty when retired.

[cliveholloway]

If I was driving in the desert, of course I would learn how to fix a car. You might as well have said, "if you go scuba diving don't whine if you get decompression sickness while surfacing". What a really bad analogy.

Where do you draw the line? Do you make your own yoghurt? What about milk your own cows? I very much doubt you do that. My time is valuable enough that I'm comfortable paying people to do these things for me.

If person A offers a service to person B, there needs to be some level of trust and expectation. In this instance, the government is responsible for destroying people's assets and I hope they get sued to oblivion for screwing up. Other times, companies are at fault.

Gotta love the Libertarian mindset that appears to prevail here. Sheesh.

[nitrogen]

My time is valuable enough that I'm comfortable paying people to do these things for me.

I think it's still worthwhile to have a superficial understanding of the services you buy, as this allows you to maximize the value of your dollar and avoid getting fleeced.

[srdev]

They're not going to be able to get around the fact that the third-party they're entrusting their files to don't care about their data as much as they do. Its not a technology problem. You could pay more for a service that has a contract with an SLA, but all that does is give you legal recourse if they do lose your data. It doesn't mean that they're actually protecting it.

Today it was the Feds. Tomorrow, it could just be a poorly run company going out of business. Or a massive failure in a technology stack without redundancy. Consumers can't reasonably predict these sorts of thing, so the only reasonable course of action is to keep redundant copies of your data. Use SpiderOak and sync a few computers. Get an External HD.

So what the consumer should take away is that they shouldn't trust a third-party with the only copy of their unrecoverable data. The fact that they don't want to care doesn't mean that they shouldn't or that they can actually not care.