I would argue, on average, it actually is. Because it's not that we are getting nothing in return: We are getting stewardship.
Let us at least acknowledge this part of the equation: Hosting things securely and reliably is only naively easy and cheap, and on top only like drawing a picture is easy, if you are Picasso. Sure, you can put those years of professional devops experience to use to maintain a private data haven – but that's not something that will work for most people and it is fairly obvious that, on average, our collective data would be a lot less safe if rolling hosting became everyones favorite passion project.
That is certainly a convenience that is gained by renting something, but (1) the significance of that convenience is minimal compared to the threat of the company taking away what you've bought, intentionally or not, and (2) paid backup services exist.
It is far from obvious that people renting things instead of owning them makes our collective data a lot more safe. It seems to me that the data would be a lot more vulnerable to companies deciding to make (more) money.
> It is far from obvious that people renting things instead of owning them makes our collective data a lot more safe.
You would probably reconsider if you spent more time around the, to this day, ocean of outdated and unmaintained-until-physical-failure-windows-2000ish-servers sprinkled throughout fairly touchy parts of our society, connected to the, gasp, internet.
> It seems to me that the data would be a lot more vulnerable to companies deciding to make (more) money.
If I have to chose between Google and a free ticket to built vast botnets on perpetually legacy, unmaintained infra, I will, until further notice, gladly have the former every time and let legislation take it from there.
I'm confused. We're talking about video games and other digital media. You would put those on an external drive or similar. Why would the vulnerabilities of such a solution have any overlap with windows 2000-era servers used for infrastructure? What does infrastructure have in common with personal backups?
Except that I can control whether the server I run is up to date, or internet-connected, or has appropriate NACLs, whereas I know firsthand that most large companies do not meet patching SLAs, or have properly-configured security controls.
This is a tech space; if you work around security, you know that someone's home computer is going to usually be harder to hack than a big corporation that has an attack surface a million miles wide.
Maybe I can phish you and get on your machine, but maybe not. But I can definitely phish at least one person at a big company, and usually many more. Your home machine doesn't have an ssh key buried in a git repo's commit history, or in a public S3 bucket, etc.
Most large-scale botnets running on consumer machines target either IoT or routers, both of which are difficult for consumers to patch, so that's more bad business security once again, than bad consumers.
> choose between Google and a free ticket to built vast botnets on perpetually legacy, unmaintained infra
My god, what a false dichotomy. Yes, every computer not run by Google is running freshly-installed, never-been-updated Windows 95, but Google is totally absolutely positively doing better than all the others in the same space. /s
That's a false dichotomy. Bandcamp will sell me music I can download _and_ let me stream it.
But separately, I don't want stewardship for my data to rest with whoever I transact with to acquire that data. Why not a digital locker standard, where you sign in with your digital locker when purchasing digital content, and that content is saved to your locker, with whatever metadata? You can then search and play your purchased content through whatever client you like, regardless of where you got it from. You can sort of do that today (to the extent that you can still purchase digital content--there's music that's available to stream that I have not been able to find for purchase) with files, but you lose the stewardship and it's a lot of work.
You can argue that the subscription model pays for the stewardship in a way purchases would not, but surely digital content is easier to work with than CDs and DVDs.
I think most consumers don't really care, though, and I'm guessing content platforms don't really see the point of supporting something like that.
I would argue, on average, it actually is. Because it's not that we are getting nothing in return: We are getting stewardship.
Let us at least acknowledge this part of the equation: Hosting things securely and reliably is only naively easy and cheap, and on top only like drawing a picture is easy, if you are Picasso. Sure, you can put those years of professional devops experience to use to maintain a private data haven – but that's not something that will work for most people and it is fairly obvious that, on average, our collective data would be a lot less safe if rolling hosting became everyones favorite passion project.