Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Why nonprofits should not depend on any single tech provider

Free is good, right? It's certainly a very attractive price to nonprofit organizations, which are always, shall we say, "resource constrained." (read: broke)

There are lots of reasons to be wary of free, but I'm not going to go into all of them here (again).

Let's just focus on why its a bad idea to become dependent on any single tech service provider - be it a social media platform or a storage service or a shared document host.

It boils down to one simple reason - you're subject to their rules, at all times.

Here's a headline from today: "Why is Google Docs Terrifyingly locking people out of their Documents?"  The examples listed include research on "wildlife crime" and work on "post socialist Europe." Users tried to log in this morning only to find out that their work was suddenly in violation of Google's Terms of Service. Their documents were now off limits.

What happened? At least according the story above, Google updated its software code which may have made "its spam detection go rogue." Or not. We'll only know what Google chooses to tell us.

For those who were working on those documents and are now locked out, they can't get any work done and who knows what they may have lost. This in and of itself ought to scare you into 1) backing up and 2) backing up. But isn't that the plus of these online documents - you don't have to back up?  Hmm, maybe not.

More importantly, if the examples of work I had cited about above had included "documenting White House lawyers hired since January," or "lists of immigration assistance centers," or "a table of registered gun owners addresses sorted by distance from nearest elementary school" you might be less likely to believe a software glitch and more concerned that something else was going on.

Either way, you'd still be stuck. Google's first response to inquiries about today's "mishap" - "We'll provide more information when appropriate" wouldn't be very comforting.

Later in the day,  Google issued this response: "This morning, we made a code push that incorrectly flagged a small percentage of Google Docs as abusive, which caused those documents to be automatically blocked. A fix is in place and all users should have full access to their docs." 

Which raises yet another question - before you and your team start working on a shared document, do you check your work against Google's Terms of Service? Remember, you have been warned - the system is scanning your documents at all times. There is nothing private or protected about the information you're putting there, and it's continued existence depends on the ToS which you probably haven't read.


Free is a tough price to beat. But it does mean you get what you pay for, plus the potential for censorship.

*Yes, I know I'm writing this on blogger, owned and hosted by Google. I back it up, offline.





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