The leak of more than 100,000 iPad users' email addresses and device ID numbers from an AT&T (NYSE: T) website last week sparked heavy criticism of the mobile device and its maker, Apple. The blogging site Gawker, which published a redacted list of the email addresses after receiving the data from the white hat hackers who found it, was quick to denounce Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) security efforts.

In a post titled "Apple's Worst Security Breach," Gawker's Ryan Tate wrote that "Apple bears responsibility for ensuring the privacy of its users, who must provide the company with their email addresses to activate their iPads."

The focus on the device is misplaced in this instance, however. The email addresses were exposed through a flaw in the software running a public-facing application on AT&T's system. The carrier took responsibility for it, fixed it and apologized. The incident really doesn't have much to do with the device itself, but instead highlights the vulnerability of data residing in the cloud.

As more data--and more valuable data--moves to web-based systems, those systems become increasingly attractive targets of attack. What's becoming abundantly clear is that users ultimately can offer little protection for their data, regardless of how hard they work to secure their own devices, systems and practices. By putting the data in the hands of cloud providers, they take a leap of faith.

A Pew Research survey unveiled last week shows that tech experts largely believe that this leap of faith will be the norm among computer users by the year 2020, despite the mounting pile of vulnerabilities that are unearthed. There are plenty of experts who warn of the risks, but the convenience and affordability of cloud-based services apparently are enough to convince most of us to avert our eyes.

While the FBI looks into whether the iPad email address hackers committed any crime, the hackers maintain that they were just doing us all a favor. I think there may be something to that claim. - Caron