[rightbyte]

Sounds like a children story about not making a deal with the Devil?

The implied part the children already know from other stories is:

The magic elves have a recorded history of laughing at their customers when they are on the toilette, hitting on their husbands/wifes and misleading their children into worshipping the elvendom and wander off into the forest.

The story ends in some sort of catharsis for the protagonist when the elves go one step too far. In the happy ending variant Disney makes a version off it is not too late.

[api]

I don't disagree, but history shows that people (and businesses!) can and will make such trades. Look at the privacy nightmare, and it's not just individuals. Large companies put all their Crown Jewels into things like Google Drive, gmail, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. Even governments do this. The only payoff is convenience. That's how little people and even businesses value their privacy.

[TeMPOraL]

> The only payoff is convenience. That's how little people and even businesses value their privacy.

Well that, and after 2+ decades of this, we can pretty much conclusively tell it worked out great for them. They were - and are - absolutely right to "make such trades".

Yes, data leaks sometimes happen. Sometimes they even make noise in the news. And... that's about the end of it. There are no tomb raiders stealing "crown jewels" and "secret sauces" and outcompeting companies on their own turf[0] - instead, there are many success stories of systems, products and businesses that wouldn't be created if not for the ability to outsource data and document processing to cloud services.

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[0] - Except the Chinese, but that's not really about stealing secrets or private data - just that owning the factories lets you iterate on hardware faster (+ it helps to have some healthy disregard for "intellectual property").