Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

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> Also hoping unlimited high-res storage for photos in the cloud becomes a standard across all vendors. I know you aren't supposed to trust these services with your precious files, but I've been a horrible steward of my own photos and I'm always out of space on the device.

I, personally, absolutely refuse to use cloud storage of my photographs (or any data, really) that doesn't involve client-side encryption. Am I actually that concerned about my photographs themselves? No, not really — but it is the principle of the thing, as well as uncertainty about what the future might bring.

I feel the same way about my location history and other data. Can I guarantee that no government or employer for the rest of my life will penalise me for having attended a political meeting, a church or anything else? I really don't think so.

Once given to someone else, data can never be pulled back. None of us can know the future, and so it makes sense to be as conservative as possible about what we let go of.

Do you trust yourself to store things safely without data loss (even in the face of theft, house fires and natural disasters) more than the multi-level redundancy employed in the cloud?

Is data loss less important to you than possible leakage of your photographs?

These are the tradeoffs the GP made choices in.

> Do you trust yourself to store things safely without data loss (even in the face of theft, house fires and natural disasters) more than the multi-level redundancy employed in the cloud?

No: I encrypt my data locally, using protocols I believe/hope are strong enough, and then upload the encrypted data to cloud storage providing multi-level redundancy.

Right now, this is a somewhat painful process, since Google (quite deliberately, I think — 'Don't Be Evil' is now but a fading memory) choose not to facilitate it, but there's no reason why it shouldn't be as simple and straightforward as using the cloud without encryption.

Key management isn't really that difficult: have one master key, stored encrypted under the highest-strength passphrase one can remember, accessible using trusted client software (i.e. not something running in a browser). Done.

Honestly I'd imagine its more of an issue of, with encrypt then send, the only way you can browse your remote files, is to download them and then decrypt them

so that means no browsing thumbnails of what could be a large collection, no viewing dates or other information on those files (since that is information leaked).

the only real way is to cache all that information on each device that would want to access those photos, which is doable, but it would feel a bit awkward, especially if sharing any of the data with other devices

> Honestly I'd imagine its more of an issue of, with encrypt then send, the only way you can browse your remote files, is to download them and then decrypt them

That's the only way to view any information: it has to be downloaded.

> so that means no browsing thumbnails of what could be a large collection, no viewing dates or other information on those files (since that is information leaked).

An client-side-encrypted photo store could easily support uploaded thumbnails (just not server-generated ones), and separate downloads for them. A client-side-encrypted data store could easily support separately-encrypted metadata, and there are some protocols for cryptographically-secure queries too.

> I, personally, absolutely refuse to use cloud storage of my photographs (or any data, really) that doesn't involve client-side encryption. Am I actually that concerned about my photographs themselves? No, not really — but it is the principle of the thing, as well as uncertainty about what the future might bring.

> I feel the same way about my location history and other data. Can I guarantee that no government or employer for the rest of my life will penalise me for having attended a political meeting, a church or anything else? I really don't think so.

>...

> Once given to someone else, data can never be pulled back. None of us can know the future, and so it makes sense to be as conservative as possible about what we let go of.

Although I struggle many a times to convey this to people in a way they would understand the implications of, this is the reason why I use SpiderOak to backup photos and other files (I do have a few dislikes about the SpiderOak backup solution and the client application). Even there, some sensitive data is actually in an encrypted volume file (encrypted before the SpiderOak client re-encrypts it). I also have multiple offline backups on external drives (though none being off-site) because I have faced data loss due to hardware failures before and I know that doing regular backups is the best way to reduce risks.

I'm also planning to move out of Dropbox, which I mainly use to store some re-downloadable content from elsewhere.

I pay for the SpiderOak service and use it on my Linux and Mac laptops - works fine.

I looked at the Android app, and I thought it had some security concerns, in the sense that using the Android app was no longer zero-knowledge at there end. Is that so?

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