Irregular Possession

Russell makes an interesting point about how web services seem to choose either “your” or “my” when talking about the user’s settings/things/stuff.

Pondering it for a bit, I decided it would be nice if the choice helped reinforce where the data was being stored. That might help people get their heads around the risks (of the data being given to $random_government or of disappearing if the company gets sold or goes bust, etc.) of “cloud” storage versus local storage.

So Windows is correct in using the term “My Documents” (assuming it still does, I don’t spend much time there these days) because the items are held on my hard disk, which is in my possession. And Last.fm is right to say “Your account settings” because they’re holding my account details along with many others.

Sadly I can’t see it catching on.