Very timely, from my point of view, because I was just discussing with my brother the relationship between technology and unsavory activity.

The first thing we have to remember is that people have been exploiting technology for good and ill since the dawn of man. It doesn't matter whether the stone hammer was first conceived as a tool or a weapon, it was undoubtedly used as both.

The second thing we have to remember is that avoiding a technology because of the potential for misuse also means not being able to exploit that technology for good and useful things. Yes, several thousand deaths per year can be traced to the misuse of cell phones. I wonder, though, how may saved lives can be traced to cell phones, surely not zero! What this tells me is that we have to learn how to manage the use of technologies for greater net benefit.

To the cloud: I'm sure that we can all think of examples where cloud computing and/or storage would be beneficial. Likewise, anybody with a sense of history of even just computers can think of ways to use those same things for nefarious activities.

In my mind, the existence of risk is not a sufficient reason to avoid a technology or activity. We need to have a tolerance for non-zero risk if only because there is no such thing as zero risk. Having identified what risk we can tolerate, we then need to quantify the risk. If that risk is higher than what we can tolerate, then we need to take steps to reduce the risk. In the vast majority of cases, exposure reduction (limited or no involvement) is just one of several ways to reduce the risk. Exposure reduction is also rarely the best way to reduce the risk because it also reduces the potential for gain.

EDIT: I would like to add that we often think of risk only in terms of adopting a technology or engaging in some activity. We also need to consider the risk of not adopting that technology or engaging in that activity. For example, it's obvious that every form of exercise increases the risk of injury compared to not exercising. Except that being fit reduces the risk of injurious falls and the risk of heart attack, etc.