Helping you organise and protect your personal information

Saturday, January 8, 2011

How private is our personal information?

We have all heard about Wikileaks. I noticed this article today that made me think about all personal information stored on the web in cloud based solutions that you may think is private and secure but can be clearly accessed under legal process as required.

http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/world/8615201/u-s-orders-twitter-to-hand-over-wikileaks-records/

We considering this as part of the design of myINFOSAFE. If we were ever asked to provide details of account codes and encryption keys for customers by the court, we would have to do this. But we could not provide any of the customers personal information stored in myINFOSAFE as we do not have access to it as it is stored locally on the users PC and is protected by a password that we do not know. (assuming the user has changed it from the default). The customer has control of their information and they can protect it, back it up or delete it in any way they want.

It makes you think that while there are many benefits of cloud based systems there are weaknesses that you need to be aware of in relation to your personal information.

Look forward to some discussion on this please.