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Comment by markshepard | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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

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