When is your data not your own? When it's in the cloud

by
in security on (#3MK)
story imageI've got Captain Obvious on the line, and he'd like you to know: the data you store in the cloud isn't private. You might be thinking, "I knew that." But it's news to some, like this guy, who got busted for possession of illegal pornographic images (child porn) , after backing up his computer to a Verizon cloud backup service. Bonus: he was the deacon of a Catholic school in Baltimore county: oops.
Turns out, cloud storage providers routinely sweep stored data, using hashes for known illegal images or media files. If they find one, you're toast.

From Ars Technica:
When Congress passed the PROTECT Our Children Act of 2008 mandating that service providers report suspected child pornography in the content that their customers surf and store, the law gave providers an out: if they couldn't check, they wouldn't know, and they wouldn't have to report it. But while checking is still voluntary, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has been pushing providers to use image-matching technology to help stop the spread of child pornography.
This isn't breaking news: the articles date back to March. But it's still relevant in the framework of the ongoing discussion of cloud-versus-local and the rights of authorities to revise your computing habits.

Re: Microsoft comes right out with it (Score: 4, Funny)

by genx@pipedot.org on 2014-05-21 23:20 (#1TW)

Because Bugs Bunny wears no clothes, I guess he's off limits, too.
A relative of mine often posts on Flickr pictures of a squirrel that visits his garden daily. On one single image, amongst those many pictures, the squirrel presented his back to the camera. That picture was censored!

Either somewhere, there is someone who, every-day, looks for photos of squirrel butts and reports them, or someone has programmed a squirrel butt detector... I am not sure which hypothesis is the most disturbing.
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