cloud service privacy (essay draft)

If you use a cloud service, the simple truth is that you need to expect that the people operatng the service reserve the ability to access anything you upload to their computers.

It does not necessarily mean they will, but that they technically are able to.

Any cloud storage operator is highly reluctant to store any data on their computers that they can not view themselves.

Even if they claim to encrypt your data, they almost certainly reserve a master decryption key.

 

If you are lucky, no human employee at the cloud service provider stumbles upon your files, since the service might have millions of other users with a sheer amount of data that can not be overviewed by human staff. However, it is not guaranteed never to happen. Some artificial intelligence might mark your files as "suspicious", putting them in a queue for human review.