And so, ideally, I want to be able to tell my accountant to store my archival tax records in <i>my</i> safe-deposit box, not in his office. Compute infrastructure is a commodity—doesn&#x27;t matter who&#x27;s paying for it—but all the services you depend on <i>should</i> rely on storage infrastructure <i>you</i> have an SLA agreement with.<p>I don&#x27;t care about the &quot;distributed computation&quot; promises of Diaspora or Sandstorm.io; I think they&#x27;re wrongheaded. Anyone can do compute. But I really <i>do</i> hope that one day that my Facebook account can be canonically &quot;stored on&quot; a database instance I&#x27;m paying for, that Facebook&#x27;s app servers will reach out and connect to and treat as the canonical source for &quot;me&quot;, treating their own records as a secondary cache. This kind of setup would makes all <i>sorts</i> of things simpler and clearer and more secure; there would be a definite boundary where &quot;my data&quot; stops (the DB I own) and &quot;Facebook&#x27;s data&quot; starts (the DBs they own.)<p>And, to be clear, I&#x27;m not talking about everybody running their own infrastructure, or even everybody knowing what an IaaS provider is. Ideally, PaaS providers could get into the &quot;consumer instances&quot; game the way Dropbox is in the &quot;consumer files&quot; game. My &quot;Facebook account database&quot; above could be transparently launched into my own cute little private cloud by my PaaS provider when Facebook requests it through some OAuth-like pairing API. I wouldn&#x27;t need to think of myself, as a user, as &quot;owning cloud database instances.&quot; From my perspective, I&#x27;d get an abstract &quot;Facebook account&quot; (which is actually an app instance and attached DBs) sitting in my Heroku-for-consumers account. The <i>important</i> bit is that I&#x27;d be <i>paying</i> for the resources that &quot;account&quot; object consumes, that I&#x27;d have an SLA on those resources, and that the PaaS company would have every incentive to make it easy for other third-party services to interact with my &quot;Facebook database&quot; in a way Facebook themselves aren&#x27;t. I, as a user, have no need to &quot;manage&quot; a cloud of my own; I just need to be considered to <i>own</i> it.