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: 3, Insightful)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-05-22 11:14 (#1V6)

I know there are people out there working for law enforcement agencies whose job it is to pore over tons and tons of child abuse images attempting to discern trends, identify sources or victims, and so on. Most of them don't last long, since it's so horrifically upsetting to anyone who cares about children. So, can we assume someone out there has the job of squirrel butt censor? That would be like the worst intership ever.

An interesting study would be for some journalist to open up different cloud backup accounts and post different things to see what gets flagged and what doesn't.

It still reinforces my idea that I'm going to buy a second NAS and back stuff up between the two NASes instead of backing up my NAS to some cloud provider. It seems interesting and useful from a technical point of view, but given the current legal and political environment, it hardly seems worth it.
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