Cloud Storage: The Latest Threat To Our Online Privacy And Data Security?

It’s really difficult what to make all of this and to what level we really need to be concerned. If the NSA has reportedly cracked all of the encryption technologies that are used in personal and commercial data communications in the U.S., there is no reason to believe others have not done the same or will do so soon – be they foreign governments or criminals. To the “security experts” who won’t use e-banking or e-commerce technology, me thinks the odds of your being ripped off by the minimum wage barista at Starbucks are infinitely higher than they are of someone cracking your e-banking connection, stealing your login information and your money.

I had to buy a new wireless router this week when our TimeCapsule died. Not an Apple, but something that require a bit more setup, and because of Flash issues (I believe), I ended up with a tech support guy named Roger that sounded like his name should have been Rahib. Nearly two hours later it was fixed, but our home automation controller couldn’t connect to it. A few days of fiddling with it made me realize that I hadn’t added its MAC address to the router’s “allowed” list. All this to make sure that no one within a 100′ radius or so of our house couldn’t get into our network, use our connectivity, turn on our water heater in the middle of the night and run up our electric bill, or get into our personal files, if they even were capable of doing so (though the guy downstairs is a former Silicon Valley programmer. Hmmm…).

Cloud providers? Makes you wonder that even if you don’t keep valuable data on them if the government has forced them to provide backdoors that allows anyone with their software (DotMac, DropBox, Google Drive, Copy, Amazon, etc) to get into areas of your computer that aren’t sync’d. Paranoid or justifiably concerned? I dunno.

No answers here, but just a lot of thought about how much time and effort we put into protecting our money, knowledge and data, and how successful we can really be in doing so. But revelations like this might do it. If people stop using these kinds of services and it starts affecting the bottom line of big US companies, would changes be not far behind?