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: March 2013! (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-05-22 11:10 (#1V5)

You get credit for reading the article, but not the summary, in which I myself stated these are old articles but still relevant because it's an interesting topic. Pipedot is not necessarily going to be a source of breaking news; neither is Soylent; neither was Slashdot, neither was/is OSNews. Everything you ever see posted at a site like these is going to contain a URL linking to some site where the news 'broke.' It is however a great place to gather with like-minded nerds and discuss things of interest to us. Me, I prefer interesting topics that examine the big picture of trends and happenings, over a new article and 3-4 comments for every little event. It's more interesting to me to examine the forest for the forest, instead of every single tree.

If you need breaking news scoops, you may either crowdfund my investigative journalism career (I'm going to need an apartment in Silicon Valley, daily living expenses, etc.) - joke - or stuff your RSS reader with the feeds of dozens of major and minor news sources and bloggers, or stay glued to Twitter. Alternatively, if you come across those breaking stories yourself, the "Submit" button is at the upper right.
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