

As NSA Worries Cloud Dropbox, Tonido Offers its “Personal Cloud” - adampludwig70
http://techonomy.com/2013/07/as-nsa-worries-cloud-dropbox-tonido-offers-its-personal-cloud/

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mark_l_watson
I handle Dropbox privacy by having a script that GPG encrypts critical files
(SSH keys for customer's servers, confidential material that I have signed
strong NDAs for, etc.) and backs up the encrypted versions to my Dropbox
account. So, I end up with maybe 0.1% of my Dropbox storage being encrypted.

My standard consulting contract stipulates that I take reasonable precautions
with customer materials, and I feel like this is good enough.

I don't trust any computer systems to be absolutely secure from organized
crime and all governments (I am not equating the two :-) and having the NSA,
GCHQ, etc. store mass quantities of data seems like a real problem since
organized crime and other governments might hack in and then have a lot of
business sensitive material in one place, and also, get a potential source of
blackmail material all in one place.

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markshepard
Unfortunately, There is no way to avoid NSA type surveillance.. without or
without "Personal Clouds". I guess It does help reduce the footprint, but with
the move to think clients (like mobile devices) and Cloud backends, I am
afraid, the public cloud move seems quite irreversible and therefore no way to
avoid snooping either by governments or abuse by corporations.

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captiva12
At least with personal clouds you own your data. The real fundamental issue
with public cloud is all the data at one place. When you have everything at
one place it is prone for abuse.

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markshepard
Yes that is precisely the problem (and one that is probably in the interest of
government and companies.. just not in the interest of the actual owner of
data). Even companies like google providing cloud services like
music/mail/docs scan for usage information to push advertisement. So even
though this article is for NSA, it applies to companies as well.

The Personal cloud in spite of increased simplicity still requires certain
amount of computer setup knowledge, that coupled with murky privacy policies
(think facebook) means that user data in public cloud is always going to be a
well sought after prize

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Mordor
perhaps 'cloud' is a misnomer - any ideas what the _real_ name should be?

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captiva12
Can you explain?

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Mordor
A cloud is what exactly - something fluffy in the sky, an omen of rain
perhaps? It's supposed to make you feel safe, but is this really what they are
when you're surrendering your most personal information to some greedy
corporation and the all seeing eye of the government?

Perhaps a prison cell or operating table would be more appropriate?

