The Cloud’s My-Mom-Cleaned-My-Room Problem – Alexis Madrigal:

Netflix, Twitter, and Google make unasked-for, unanticipated, and unstoppable change in their products, which also happen to be our work and play spaces.

and

But the freedom of usage that defined personal computing does not extend to the world of parental computing. This isn’t a bug in the way that cloud services work. It is a feature. What we lose in freedom we gain in convenience. Maybe the tradeoff is worth it. Or maybe it’s something that just happened to us, which we’ll regret when we realize the privacy, security, and autonomy we’ve given up to sync our documents and correspondence across computers.

[The thing to remember is that we do not have to give up one to have the other. We can have document syncing etc. without living “in our parents house” simply by paying for the services. We can have our privacy and our freedom. But it has a cost.]