> We will never mine your data, claim your copyright or invade your privacy.
That sounds great and all, but I don't want your word, I want cryptographic guarantees. Are there any?
EDIT: https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/privacy-... doesn't mention anything, so I guess not.
It actually makes perfect sense the company would want to provide the tools that protect you from them. Take Signal for example, it's a messaging app that does beautiful integration of E2EE into the message transfer product. It's much better than e.g. OTR-plugin developed by Goldberg, Borisov et. al. for Pidgin etc.
What matters is transparency: Does the company allow you to verify their native client does proper client-side encryption, and does that FOSS code have reproducible builds. If yes, then it's much better the company spends some of the revenue from sold space into developing and auditing the client and its cryptographic implementations.
It's just kind of a gut feeling that centralization of power (i.e. possession of the data and knowledge about and control of the encryption mechanism) makes such a service a more attractive target to compromise.
Of course, if you really wanted to get the data of a specific person all you'd have to compromise is the encryption funnel regardless of where the data is stored. But I'm thinking, distributing control over the storage and the encryption is gonna make it a lot harder to do that because there's no single party that knows about both other than you.
I have old 5.25" and 3.5" floppies, full of software written by my father during the course of developing his dissertation. He died several years ago.
My original plan was to take whole disk images of it and stash it in the commercial cloud, ... but I'm probably going to stash a copy on permanent.org instead. I have no idea if my descendents would care about it. However, it is a memorial that (if the foundation does what it promises to do), not something I would have to do upkeep after I die.
At the end of the day, these people can just take all that money, keep some for themselves, and say "ok we tried our best but didn't work out, it was an incredible journey!" and be done with it. and nobody can hold them accountable.
If they really want to do their best to "guarantee" permanence, they should guarantee the debt relationship, so if the forever condition doesn't hold after a couple of years, they will be sought out and collected all the money they took.
What's to say that there would still be an organisation left to pay up the debt?
They'll probably need to hold some funds in escrow for it.
It's in your power to do your own mangling before uploading. The same with redundancy: don't put all your eggs in one basket (fancy promises or not). Good luck!