Sunday, September 28, 2014

Security Concern with icloud

This is a good essay on the security trade-offs with cloud backup:
iCloud backups have not eliminated this problem, but they have made it far less common. This is, like almost everything in tech, a trade-off:
  • Your data is far safer from irretrievable loss if it is synced/backed up, regularly, to a cloud-based service.
  • Your data is more at risk of being stolen if it is synced/backed up, regularly, to a cloud-based service.
Ideally, the companies that provide such services minimize the risk of your account being hijacked while maximizing the simplicity and ease of setting it up and using it. But clearly these two goals are in conflict. There's no way around the fact that the proper balance is somewhere in between maximal security and minimal complexity.
Further, I would wager heavily that there are thousands and thousands more people who have been traumatized by irretrievable data loss (who would have been saved if they'd had cloud-based backups) than those who have been victimized by having their cloud-based accounts hijacked (who would have been saved if they had only stored their data locally on their devices).
It is thus, in my opinion, terribly irresponsible to advise people to blindly not trust Apple (or Google, or Dropbox, or Microsoft, etc.) with "any of your data" without emphasizing, clearly and adamantly, that by only storing their data on-device, they greatly increase the risk of losing everything.
It's true. For most people, the risk of data loss is greater than the risk of data theft.

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