There are privacy issues, but for media, for the most part, there really aren’t too many. I could care less honestly if someone goes around copying my music collection or peeking at my uploaded video collection, because if there was anything private, I would keep it locally.

First is legal exposure. Online storage will always be readily accessible to law enforcement, and any agency can be corrupted at any level. Look at the spying charges against the FBI and their unwarranted security letters, and the Patriot Act trouncing of due process still in the courts. Not to mention individual sellers of secrets and other human failures.

And that doesn’t even come close to what foreign governments may claim or attempt in the future. Since the Internet connects to their country, they make claim access to everything online — to make criminal charges across borders, to leverage graft and corruption, whatever. Watch the scandals and corruption of the UN. United Nations? United in Graft. What age subject is ‘child porn’ in *your* country, what kind of depiction violates *your* laws? What trade secrets are worth stealing or compromising?

Anything that law enforcement can require online hosts to provide creates a window of opportunity for hackers and foreign hostile agents to steal, destroy, or corrupt data. We may see more domestic industrial and military espionage as well. The more data online, the more targets for hostiles to attack.

And there will be private activities. Applications to operate offline devices, perform offline tasks, where connectivity is seldom of use. Application development, novel creation. Music libraries – Who wants to upload all 1200 of the tunes off their CD’s, then have the RIAA decide that is publishing, demand a $500/month fee and 12 cents a song every month?

Oh, I see where you are going. The personal storage market will start drying up, and the cost of devices will climb as market volume drops. Sort of like the artificial way the oil companies always seem to raise gas prices for Memorial Day and Labor Day.

Grr.

Those of us in areas prone to natural disaster or service interruptions (like myself in South Florida, hurricanes, bad storms, idiot construction workers cutting lines, etc), people simply can’t afford to be cut off from their media and files if there is an issue with connectivity.

Flickr has only gone down a handful of times, and each of those outages have been very abbreviated, but consider if you will, large server farms and interruptions (a good number of services went down recently in California, including many blogging services and Technorati).

People use personal or home storage for two main reasons: fast, immediate access without an internet connection, and higher quality than most online storage services can allow.

I think personal/home storage will become reduced in the near future, but I don’t think it will ever go away.

First thing’s first: vendors need to come up with methods to increase transmission quality without requiring consumers have and pay for the latest in internet connectivity.