An article in The Australian from Tuesday (heck, dontcha just love the global world we live in) talks about SaaS provider NetSuite rejecting Google Apps on the grounds of Google's terms of service regarding mining of data.
This shows one of the key issues that Cloud/SaaS is starting to open up – that of information security.
I think that it is fairly straightforward that companies don't want a service provider to use their business data in an identifiable way for commercial gain with a third party, in the Wal*Mart “Beer and Nappies” type model.
However, there are some cases that are more complicated:
Anonymous mining of patterns of usage for use internally within the service provider for product enhancement and development is probably a good thing.
Mining of data to provide contextual functionality to the individual (eg you've just read an email about a subject so that next time you search for something, results are influenced by that subject) is also probably desirable… but very close to showing of adverts relating to content (which might not be a good thing).
Mining of data to provide contextual functionality to the organisation (eg “people who looked at this document also looked at these”) is also probably a good thing.
There are undoubtedly many more cases, but the issue appears to be the need for a mindset shift because the mining needs to be done by the service provider on their servers (as opposed to under the direct control of the consuming organisation).
I had a funny experience this morning that illustrated all of this. I had just picked up an email from a team member on my Android phone via Webmail saying that he was delayed on his flight back from Canada on their national airline. I switched to the phone's search tool to find out further details, typed “air” and it suggested “Air Canada” on auto complete.
The above could well have been coincidental, but imagine it wasn't as an example of contextual functionality provided by Google mining into my personal data. Is that a good thing? It certainly saved me a few moments of touch-screen typing.
A lot of our existing models for the control of data have been broken by the Internet. The reality is that with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube et al., there is little control over data within organisations, because if you try to control it, people will find free, open alternatives on the Web. It's going to take quite some time, though, for business practice (and legislation in some cases) to catch up with all of this…
mmitII 