As NSA Worries Cloud Dropbox, Tonido Offers its “Personal Cloud” | Hacker News Reader

As NSA Worries Cloud Dropbox, Tonido Offers its “Personal Cloud”

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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.

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.

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.

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

I think the safest thing to do is to avoid all cloud services that aren't essential to you. Downloading all of your email and removing them from cloud providers (gmail, yahoo, etc...) is probably a good idea too.

All of the cloud providers provide a convenience at the cost of security and privacy. The cloud providers might be just fine if you don't care about your privacy.

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

Can you explain?

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?

yeah, cloud is one of those terms used,overused and abused to a point that it can mean anything. In this context, the "Personal Cloud" means "Public Cloud" like functionality(basically data residing somewhere and your method of accessing it is using various client applications) with ownership of that data in your control (The "Personal" aspect).

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