There are two sides to almost every part of cloud, and for me, one of the biggest two sided coins is data mining. It’s impossible to exist in any form online without mass amounts of data being tracked and mined in the back-end. It’s a scary thing. While there are great free services like Google and Facebook, we all know that in return for these services we pay with our privacy. Other companies pay these service providers to make me a target for their ads based. And with more and more software and services placed in the cloud, the desire for companies to leverage these services as a source of data to help drive revenue will become more invasive. But there is an upside (in my opinion) to data mining, an upside that could help mankind advance through leaps and bounds. This upside is in science. Continue reading →