Edward Snowden recently had a lot to say about the NSA in his interview with The Guardian. He spoke of how immature employees collect nude images of innocent citizens and share them around the office. However, Snowden also touched on how popular cloud storage service, Dropbox, is not a fan of privacy.
There are several reasons for Snowden's negative outburst against Dropbox. Back in April, the company hired and added former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to its Board of Directors. In the eyes of Snowden, this woman has a hatred for privacy and is one of the most anti-privacy officials ever to climb up the ranks in the U.S. government.
According to Snowden, Condoleeza Rice was one of several government officials who oversaw the Stellar Wind Program. For those who are not in the know, the Stellar Wind Program allowed the National Security Agency to collect American citizen's email and Internet records for around 10 years after the September 11 attacks.
He also went on to state how much Rice is prominent in warrantless wiretapping, which is one of the reasons why there was a campaign calling on people to dump Dropbox after she was brought on to the board of directors.
Despite the things Condoleeza Rice has done that are deemed anti-privacy, CEO of Dropbox, Drew Houston supported her accession to the board of directors in an open letter.
Snowden later in the interview said cloud companies should look to moving to a zero-knowledge approach, similar to what cloud service company Spider Oak is doing.
How does zero-knowledge works?
Well, cloud providers that use zero-knowledge tend to encrypt the data before it reaches the cloud and leaves the key with the user. This means that users are the only ones that have access to their data since no one, not even the provider, has the key.
"That's the only way they [the cloud service providers] can prove to the customers that they can be trusted with their information," Snowden said.
It would be great if all cloud service providers choose to go down this route, but this might not happen, not for a very long time.
