By Joshua Kopstein, Aljazeera America

There’s a saying you’ll hear in certain tech circles: There is no cloud, just other people’s computers.

The cloud is, of course, the vast collection of distant databanks we use to back up our vacation photos, search the Web, make online purchases, find the quickest route home and do pretty much everything else. It is owned by unaccountable corporations, is regularly accessed by police and intelligence agencies and creates a convenient gold mine of credit card numbers, nude photos and other private data for malicious hackers to steal.

And increasingly, using it is no longer optional.

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