By Ida B. Torn

When I traveled to North Carolina on a family vacation in the 1980s, acid rain was a hot topic in the news. The Blue Ridge Mountains’ majestic beauty was scarred by large swaths of dead and dying trees. This past Labor Day weekend, my family and I were once again traveling this great country of ours and I was reminded of that trip to North Carolina, but not because of the landscape that passed me by in the car.

During our travels, we stayed at three different hotels, all of which offered free wi-fi access. Like most people, all of my technology is cloud based. Tech companies tout “the cloud” as being the silver lining solution for all of your data needs. Try spending half an hour working on an important document that gets lost because the hotel you are staying in has spotty wi-fi and you lose all of your work when the connection cuts out. Suddenly, I was one of those trees in the Blue Ridge Mountains, scorched and poisoned by the very source of sustenance I was relying on!

Thanks to the cloud, you no longer have to think for yourself. You can literally have your head in the clouds and marketers will gladly do your thinking for you. Just download an app to your phone and the same mobile geofencing technology that is used to track criminals under house arrest can tell you where you should eat, buy gas, go shopping and do all of your banking. The irony that we are prisoners to the cloud is not lost on me.

If the marketers can access your every move through their cloud, how difficult must it be for identity thieves to access it? The security breach at Equifax has put as many as 143 million Americans at risk for identity theft. As a consolation prize, Equifax is offering one year of free credit monitoring services, once again seeding their cloud with your private information and producing another bumper crop for identity thieves to harvest.

Clouds can aid in the production of life sustaining resources but they can also produce life threatening storms. Just as in nature, we cannot control which kind of technological clouds we find ourselves living under. Unlike in nature, we cannot predict when a technological storm is going to hit, which greatly increases our risk for catastrophic damages. And now, thanks to cloud-based technology, we need to add identity theft protection to our insurance portfolio. Lucky for us, the cloud can tell us which insurance companies are in our immediate vicinity.

I, for one, think it is high time that we get our heads and our data out of the clouds.