Hey, you, get offa my cloud

Mick Jagger was way ahead of the curve when he used 'my cloud' as a metaphor for my patch in 1965.
Today, everyone wants us to make their cloud 'my cloud'.
We can do our work in Google's cloud. Apple will let us store our tunes and pictures in the iCloud. Amazon want us to store the digital stuff we buy from them in their cloud. And Facebook allow us to publish our lives in their cloud.
Whose cloud do you want to get ona?
The great advantage of clouds is that much of what they are selling is free. Why any small business chooses to pay Microsoft hundreds of pounds per computer for apps like Word and Excel when Google give you docs for free beats me.
Ah, say the doomsayers, but it's not under your control. What if Google breaks down? what if the Internet breaks down? What about your privacy?
But look at the odds. What would Ray Winstone give on someone spilling coffee on your computer before Google breaks down?
Which is more likely: your office server packing up or the Internet keeling over?
And keeping yourself private is a very difficult and very expensive thing to try. There is lots of information on all of us out there on various clouds and most of it is making life easier for us.
Google know a lot about me because I use their services. I get a benefit; they get a benefit. Sounds fair.
Amazon know a lot about me because I buy stuff from them. Fine. They gave a me a free Kindle app for my phone, so I can read my books without carting my Kindle reader about.
And Google and Amazon are good companies. Their reputation is better than that of newspapers or politicians, for example.
Managing your privacy - giving up a bit here and there to gain an advantage - is a better game.
The world needs information. Amazon and Tesco use the information they hold about everything they sell and everyone they sell it to much better than most firms. Wonga will lend money to people who cannot get it from a bank, just by checking the information about those people which is out in the clouds. Even people who use Lidl, rather than Tesco, have enough data floating about to allow Wonga to say yes or no.
If you go to hospital, they take great pains to keep your medical details private. Only for certain eyes. Why? There is nothing shameful about being ill. These days, it appears, there is nothing shameful about having an embarrassing body and showing it on Channel 4. So why the secrecy? The more doctors and nurses who can see my problem, the better chance I have of getting a solution to it.
And why was there so much opposition to the idea of identify cards? A single number for me which will tell the NHS, the taxman, DVLA, the TV licence people and the passport office who I am would surely be better than the present convoluted mess.
But the minute a government suggests getting an outside company to do some of this more efficiently, people complain that they are privatising much-loved public assets.
The sooner Google are managing my data in their cloud the happier I will be.