[AccessD] Comparing Skydrive

Hi Hans

As for your privacy where your only protection is encryption, for files not spendable your only protection is a physical backup in your hand.

Of course, indeed the cloud services offering a service for a fee do much to protect your data using backup and replication. However, as you mention, your loss of contact to your data may be caused by other reasons than technical, potentially leaving you in an uncertain period for years while you argue with the hosting company or authorities.

There is only one way to shortcut this: Regular backup to local storage. 
For a business, large or small, it is simply not responsible - as many do - to rely on storing your complete business and ERP data "somewhere" at a cloud service.

/gustav


>>> hans.andersen at phulse.com 25-06-12 3:44 >>>
I'm not concerned about the legal aspect of it on a personal level (although, from a corporate security point of view, I most certainly would be). What does concern me, however, is how much knowledge about me Microsoft and any underpaid data centre technician would have access to. 

One has to also wonder what Microsofts policies to dead or expired storage drives/devices are, etc etc. There is so much to wonder. 

Also, there will undoubtably be some users who use this service to store their music and movies (legal copies or not). Considering my experience with YouTube, where they allow 3rd party media companies to black list your videos automatically (and even have a bot that tries to go through all videos and flag ones that might infringe copyrights), I'm almost certain MS will provide (if they dont already) that service, either willingly or after having been compelled to do it by the music/movie industry. That would be fine if it was done accurately to only target people who upload media they haven't acquired legally, but as with my experience with YouTube, the system is not fair or accurate and I've even had several of my videos flagged as infringing copyright when, in fact, I was using royalty free soundtracks from Apple in their iMovie software and this is a very common complaint online.

Imagine that you suddenly lose access to all your media because of some lazy company, who doesn't care about individuals rights, decided to take down everything that even resembles their content or filenames and MS themselves are too busy to handle all the cases individually as well. This is the case with YouTube right now and it has happened to many other file sharing services as well and I don't have much faith MS could do it much better.

Another cause for concern is precisely what happened to DropBox. Because they don't let you use your own private key to encrypt the data (they encrypt everything on their end with their own encryption key), they ended up accidentally exposing everyone's data to anyone due to a roll out of faulty code to their production servers.

So there's much more to be concerned about than just whether you might get in trouble for what you upload, if you are the type who is so inclined to do that sort of thing.

Best regards,
Hans-Christian Andersen


On 24 Jun 2012, at 14:53, "Gustav Brock" <gustav at cactus.dk> wrote:

> Hi Hans
> 
> No reason to be uncertain. Be sure that MS is scared to h... to face a situation where p.rn or the like has been distributed from their servers. Thus, all pictures saved do get scanned by some method to locate "skin" motives and other delicate stuff.
> 
> As always, if you plan to store sensitive material of any kind, legal or not, on remote servers out of your control, encrypt the files.
> 
> /gustav
> 
>>>> hans.andersen at phulse.com 24-06-12 23:33 >>>
> 
> Scratch that. It appears that MS is porting SkyDrive to Linux now. Looks like they have really gone all out (unusually) with this. I might have even given it a try, but I'm uncertain about their data privacy policies and encryption. Shame really.
> 
> Hans
> 
> 
> Best regards,
> Hans-Christian Andersen