Protect Your Private Stuff From Falling Into the Wrong Hands

By Nathan Young on August 14, 2013

I hope you have heard of this crazy story out of Tuscaloosa. A University of Alabama art student has filed an invasion of privacy lawsuit against Best Buy and Geek Squad because some of her nude photos were put on the internet. The plaintiff took her computer to Best Buy in Tuscaloosa, where she also worked at, in August 2011 and paid to have a problem with her hard drive fixed. Then in May 2013, the plaintiff was notified by a co-worker that nude photos of her were circulating online. The lawsuit claims that a Geek Squad employee took the photos from the plaintiff’s computer, uploaded them to the Internet and also linked them on Pirate Bay.

So the question is, why would you keep private photos or files on your computer? Whenever something happens to your computer, you might not have a chance to go back to get your important files or photos that you want no one to see. So here I am with three different options for you so your most important files and pictures will not fall into the wrong hands. If you had nude photos of yourself, you would not want to see them on the internet, don’t you?

The first option is simple. You can buy a simple flash drive for under $20. A USB flash drive is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface. USB flash drives are typically removable and rewritable, and physically much smaller than an optical disc. Just about all stores carry flash drives today.

A second option is to buy a blank CD-ROM. A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc which contains data. The name is an acronym which stands for “Compact Disc Read-only Memory”. Many computers today have CD-ROM’s that can burn any information onto discs. This option is another cheap way to save your most private information.

But there is a third option, and this option is free as long you don’t have a lot of information. I encourage everyone to back up their information on an online cloud. Many companies offer backup services under 2 GB for free! I used to be a big DropBox fan until I learned something bad. When you backup through DropBox, the encryption and decryption happens on Dropbox’s servers, not on your actual computer. Ask this question? Why would you want Dropbox to hold the encryption key and not yourself? It makes it much easier for a hacker to steal your information when they hack into the DropBox servers, which has happened before.

I found this new company that uses encrypted cloud storage and client-side encryption key creation, so even the employees cannot access any users information. SpiderOak is an easy way to secure and your online documents while keeping the ability to share and sync. It differs from Dropbox because the encryption happens on your machine, not on their servers, making it readable by you alone. You create a password on your computer, and then a strong key derivation function is used to generate encryption keys using that password, and no trace of your original password is ever uploaded to SpiderOak with your stored data.

You get 2GB of storage for free with a basic account, but you can get more storage by referral links, which earn you 1GB each, up to 50GB total for free. If you need more than that, it’s $10 a month for 100 GB. For more information about SpiderOak, go to: https://spideroak.com/