It’s another chapter in US politics, and some elements directly affect the security and integrity of both data and services they’re held on. I dropped OneDrive, Dropbox, and other Cloud services a good few years ago. My general thoughts after last night, is that, from a European perspective, we’re somewhat protected, but at the same time, I think it’s worth assessing how much sensitive, or just simply private data you hold in cloud services, and where that data is stored and in what format.
It’s a contentious topic, I recognise that, and borders on politics, - but it’s very clear that some policies are going to change for the worse, so now is as good a time as any to reflect on this now that we’re in the Back to The Future II timeline.
The only option, if you really want to use a cloud service, is to put your data, files,photos etc in encrypted archives. That way others can’t get in to your data, at least not easy.
I don’t use cloud providers as i don’t trust them, and i am a European citizen
If you don’t want to abandon cloud services altogether, Rclone with encryption could be interesting.
This way the data you store on Onedrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 and countless others can only be accessed by you. Works on Linux, MacOS, Windows and Android.
Fairly though, I don’t think it needs to be political or contentious. From a privacy and data security perspective, these are perfectly reasonable considerations. Should we trust that a stranger will respect our data and our privacy? That’s a pretty big ask.
Tools like Cryptomator, which are designed for cloud, help ensure that you don’t have to trust your provider. At least, not as far as the encrypted data is concerned.
I’m American, and I will never used the cloud; it’s completely untrustworthy. And even ignoring privacy concerns, it makes you completely dependent on the service.
Or do you mean “completely at the mercy of the service” when it comes to them either getting hacked or them being forced to give authorities access to your account?
If you really meant “dependent” by the definition of the word, please explain.
How? I’ve had Dropbox for many years. I’m not “dependent” on them in any way. It’s a convenient way for secondary backups of files and images, nothing more. IMHO.
It doesn’t matter where you store the files as long as they’re locally encrypted with well known cryptography.
You can even use Telegram to store your personal files which has unlimited cloud storage…