When is your data not your own? When it's in the cloud
I'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.
Local police in Marin communities like Novato are members of the regional Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force, and as such they participate in the common law enforcement practice of monitoring peer-to-peer file-sharing networks for possible child pornography files. In September 2013, Novato detective Amy Yardley was looking for such files being traded from Marin County IP addresses, and she scored a hit on the Ares network with a suspicious file downloaded by a Sausalito Internet subscriber.
Yardley passed the tip to the Sausalito Police Department, where detective Brian Mather obtained a search warrant for the subscriber's address. He showed up at the house with a search team but couldn't find any child pornography within. The home's residents, no doubt unnerved by both the search and the charge behind it, pleaded their innocence and gave Mather a complete list of all houseguests who had used their wireless network in recent months.
Investigating this list took months, but Mather eventually developed a suspect: Mark Magner, age 32, from nearby San Rafael. Police then searched Magner's home and seized his computer. A forensic examination of the machine turned up "multiple videos and pictures that depicted juveniles and children involved in sexual acts," in the words of a police department press release .