Local vs cloud is not the most important spectrum for digital ownership.
- Local vs cloud is not the most important spectrum for digital ownership.
- What matters more is your turf vs their turf.[a]
- These two spectrums are aligned, but not nearly as well as people intuitively think.
- Cloud and their turf: services like Gmail.
- You're entirely on Google's turf, and they can do whatever they want.
- The vast majority of cloud services are in this bucket.
- Local and your turf: a laptop running Linux.
- You decide when and what updates are installed.
- Cloud and your turf: a TEE running in the cloud.
- The Trusted Execution Environment makes it so the cloud operator can't peak inside.
- It's your turf within their territory.
- Like a digital embassy.
- Local and their turf: your iPhone.
- Apple gets to decide which updates to push to the device.
- On the device, you can't write a program to access your own iMessages.
- Local aligns with your turf, but only in some conditions.