The all seeing cloud - your eyes in the sky

Remember the Seinfeld episode when Jerry’s car gets stolen, and Jerry calls the car phone (remember those?) and talks to the thief, finds out what he is doing, how the car is doing…?

Well, a similar thing happened to Mark Bao, a 18-year-old entrepreneur and student at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Check out the post by Terrence O’Brien on Switched.com. Terrence’s post describes what Mark did to “catch” and embarrass the thief of his Macbook using of all things…the cloud, specifically cloud based backup / storage. Mark is tech savvy and used an online backup service called Backblaze which automatically synced changes made on his stolen laptop’s hard drive and browser history to Backblaze’s cloud based storage. Because of this, Mark was able to see what the thief was doing with his Macbook. The moral of Switched story: “if you do have the compulsion to take what isn’t yours, do the world a favor, and make sure you steal from people who are incredibly tech-savvy.”

So, what if you’re not tech savvy? I see an opportunity for cloud storage providers to adopt some of the same practices credit card companies have in place for stolen or lost credits cards. If you backup or sync your content with cloud company XYZ, and your system is stolen or misplaced, call this toll free number immediately and we will track any activity on the device and provide a detailed report. Think of it as identity theft protection with some property theft bonus coverage. Maybe the cloud service provider could even remotely disable or lock the system rendering it useless by the thief. Better yet, have some fun with the criminal and send some messages directly to the screen that scare the living you know what out of them.

What message would you send?

Image by: http://newyorkskywatch.com/2007/06/