Still, access to your data is far from unrestricted. This might even be true in a sense, as the app will sync (mostly) seamlessly between your devices. Ironically, the promise itself is easier access to your data. Middleware apps, on the other hand, lure you in and make you hand over your data willingly, with overblown promises of convenience. Ransomware will infect your computer, and hijack your data until you pay, without you inviting it in, unless you accept the fact that not keeping your computer safe is, in fact, an invitation, and so are unsafe online habits. The only real difference between middleware and ransomware is your consent. are all controlled by a third party, and as mentioned above, access restriction did, in fact, happen and can happen any time again.īeware of the middleman (he’s the one in the middle) Your notes, ideas, images, documents, files, etc. You will only be able to access your own data through the middleware app, and conforming to the middleman’s conditions. While storage providers have no business in restricting your access (in fact, they are interested in you being able to access everything as smoothly as possible), middlemen businesses and their middleware applications will do just the opposite. When you sign up for a service that keeps your data in the cloud, while offering a way to access and manipulate it, you are giving up your right to free data access. There is another, less high-profile, but possibly even more nagging problem is that of the middleman. The middleman, and restricting access to your dataĬloud storage is only part of the problem and is often no problem at all, or not in itself anyway. But the issue is broader than this alone. As soon as you agree to whatever terms the application maintainer puts in front of you, and start storing your files/notes/images/information in a remote location, you have forfeited physical access to, and control of your data. While this happens only occasionally, is the way you can access your own data is equally worrying. This, of course, means some malicious person(s) or organisation(s) actively being after your stuff, be it rogue hackers, or your garden variety government agency protecting your freedoms by violating them. Nearly 50 million user accounts got compromised just a few years ago, and there is no guarantee it will not happen again. Even the most popular note-taking app, Evernote is not immune to breaches. Remember when 3 billion(!!!) Yahoo accounts had been compromised ? That’s how safe your data is. While you probably still should not entrust the internet (even if it’s called “The Cloud”) with any sensitive information, large cloud providers are mostly capable of securing your data from theft. Naturally, providers and large data warehouses do introduce many fail-safes. Storage is a more complicated issue, as with multiple devices accessing the same stored data, credentials usually have to be stored somewhere too.) (Unlikely with end-to-end encryption, but that usually concerns communications. Of course, a responsible provider will secure your data in more than one way, not only by hardening their servers/services but by storing everything encrypted, which is probably the best possible way, until said hackers get their hands on the encryption keys. The late scares of meltdown/spectre have also mostly meant mostly your cloud storages were/are in danger. A large-scale hacking attack will most likely target large cloud-based data-centres, where the attackers are most likely to get access to tons of information, some of which might be useful for them. There are, of course, inherent security risks involved. Cloud storage is mostly transparent these days, and even mobile bandwidth provides mostly instantaneous access to whatever you are accessing, but Cloud storage still inevitably means to store your stuff on remote servers, God(s) know(s) where. The root cause of the problem, which restricted data access is a symptom of, is data storage, and how most cloud-based apps handle this. Cloud (in)security is not always your friend TagSpaces, the application of choice does many things right but surely is unbeatable in one particular: Data access. Soon after publishing Five Evernote alternatives, and how to preserve them in brine (this might not have been the exact title), I have settled on one of the contenders from the same list. My quest for a suitable Evernote replacement, after the company decided to restrict access to my own data, proved to be a short one.
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