OK, I'll admit it. One of my guilty pleasures in recent years has been the American television show, Storage Wars. If you are unfamiliar with the show, the premise is
simple. When storage units are abandoned, they are put up for auction. The show follows a group of potential buyers who, after getting only 5 minutes, bid on the contents of the storage units. The highest bidder then takes ownership of the storage unit's contents, which they try to re-sell for more than they paid for that storage unit. As you might expect, the buyers end up with lots of trash, but occasionally they find a gem (literally and figuratively) that enables them to turn quite a profit.

The side of the story that's glossed over on the show, though, is why someone abandoned the storage units in the first place. Were they unable to pay their storage rental bills due to hardship? forgetfullness? death? Surely, the original owners never expected a stranger to buy their posessions (prized or otherwise), let alone for it to happen on a television show.

I couldn't help but think of the parallels between physical storage space and the seemlingly limitless digital space available in "the cloud." I'm sure most of us think that we'll be the only ones who will ever have access to our photos on Facebook, our contacts in LinkedIn, our e-mails in Gmail, our files in Dropbox or Box.net or Office 365.

Much attention has been paid the security of the cloud from hackers - and rightly so - but users of cloud storage providers should get clear agreements in place that clearly states what happens if for some reason we stop paying our storage bills. Who owns the content? Is the content transferable to another owner? Is it transferable to another system? Does the content ever get destroyed?

The producers of Storage Wars are not likely to be thinking of a digital version of the show; but on TV or not, I doubt any of us would want our content to simply go to the highest bidder.