The main reason to be wary of public clouds.

The main concern lies in data privacy. Although most heavyweights in the cloud like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud offer data encryption, the privacy of your information is not absolute.

This poses a serious problem, especially for sensitive data, whether personal or professional.

Take the example of Google Drive's terms of use, which explicitly state that stored files are subject to analysis. This approach serves several purposes, including personalizing services based on information derived from your private data and detecting illicit content. Several platforms adopt a similar approach of automatic analysis.

Another compromising factor for privacy comes from using American companies. U.S. legislation, as amended by the "Patriot Act" and the "Cloud Act," now allows the country's authorities to claim access to data hosted by American companies, even when this data is stored outside the United States.

This practice goes against the principles of privacy protection, prompting the avoidance of American providers for the storage of sensitive data, whether personal or professional.

But in some circumstances, European governments also legally have the right to access cloud-stored data, although regulations vary from country to country. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the main law governing the protection of personal data in Europe. However, it also allows authorities to access it for reasons of national security or to investigate, detect, or prosecute criminal offenses as well as to protect the vital interests of a third party.

Who's to say that this list won't grow over time?

Even if you have nothing to hide, is the idea that your files could be accessed at any time due to a potential investigation really reassuring? Especially when considering that data stored on a public cloud is duplicated and backed up, offering perpetual access to a future government. Moreover, the trend towards surveillance societies has increased, a phenomenon we witnessed during the Covid pandemic. This bodes ill for the protection of our individual freedoms against future administrations. The implementation of the social credit system in China gives us an alarming glimpse of what our reality could become. Who would be willing to risk feeding such a beast with their personal data, even if a similar system were introduced more moderately in our current democracies?

It would be wise to turn away from public clouds and consider using private storage solutions for greater security and confidentiality. There's nothing better than keeping your data safe at home! Our motto at Ajabox is, "If you have nothing to hide, you harm no one by hiding it."