I got caught in the "you don't actually own the data" trap

An interesting thing happened to me today that reinforced the "you think it's yours but it's not really" principle.

Now I'm a long-term subscriber to Audible audio books and I have hundreds in my library.

Yesterday I was at the gym listening to a book that I had downloaded to my phone.  It stopped and gave me an error.  Nothing I could do would get it playing again.   There was a little padlock symbol next to the book in the library.   There were a few marked like that.

Today I contacted Audible to ask what happened, and they said that I downloaded those books when they were offered as free downloads, but now they aren't free, so they've taken them back.

I asked if there was any notification in advance and they said no.

I asked how I can tell that they plan to take some of my books back and they said you can't.  It just happens.  They just reach into your bookshelf and remove them.

There are implications here for data management.

It reinforces the knowledge that the data that you think you may control may not actually be yours to control at all.   Just as Audible can reach into my physical phone and lock a downloaded audio file, a cloud vendor can take away all your data and your backups if they are on the same cloud.

So any data on a cloud is ultimately under the control of the cloud vendor and not you.  Maybe one day they might decide that your organisation, or government, has a different opinion to theirs on some issue and they determine  that you have broken their terms of service.  Then BOOM - your enterprise data has just evaporated.

If you want ultimate control of some mission-critical data, then make sure that it's on infrastructure under your control.   And that no-one externally can reach-in and delete it.

So how much of your infrastructure "dials home" occasionally, or allows vendors to reach-in "just to monitor"?   Do you have any data at risk of being accessed or deleted by someone externally?   Do you have any software that checks for a current licence that will lock your data if it can't find one?

Do you actually own your data or is it owned by a benevolent foreign company that is currently allowing you to use it?

One last thing. So why was I so surprised?

Well, I guess Audible and I were working with different models of commerce: mine was the traditional one, while theirs is that of a modern cloud provider.  And let’s keep this in context,  this is minor stuff, and I love Audible and will continue to use them.

My “traditional” commercial model is that if someone gives you something then it’s yours.  So I downloaded the book into my library.  Even accepting that if I stop subscribing I expect to lose my library being stored on their servers.

It appears that their model may be more along the line of “we have a digital asset that is ours and we can change the rules about it from time to time”.   So when they say “free to download” they don’t mean what a regular person might assume.

So I was caught out by assuming that a “free download” meant that the book would be put in my library with the same access rights as my other books.  My traditional concepts of buying a book and “free download” of a book are clearly not the same as theirs. Only I didn’t realise it.

Bringing it back to data management

So if a cloud vendor is offering you a free product, how do you know it will remain free?   What if, say, some form of storage you are using is no longer going to be provided in your locale?   Can they say that you have 2 months to get your 200TB off their cheap storage?  Can they say that the free data security infrastructure they are providing is no longer free, or maybe only offered as part of some “premium” subscription?

So what you think is yours may, in reality, be seen by a cloud vendor as theirs.





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