One Million Troll Points
to Tencent if they host their archival storage in the US instead of China!
Chinese web giant Tencent has vowed to offer 10TB cloud storage accounts to international users free of charge. The company hopes to launch the data-archiving service worldwide in 2014 using the English language. It opened its doors in China in August, and can be accessed from desktop computers as well as mobile devices using …
Does China render, torture and bypass due process western citizens with the full support of western governments?
No, China is not, *as yet*, a deal breaker.
If my government ever crawls up the Chinese rectum, as it does the US, then may be.
Thing is, I only care about being spied on if it can have a negative effect on my life. As I type, the Chinese have no power over me. Unfortunately, some how, I am expected to follow not just UK law, but US law too. Not so with Chinese law. So, for me, the risk of the Chinese spying on me is virtually non existent. The risk I face from the US, how ever......
For me it's almost a deal clincher!
Not only do I get the benefit of not having to worry about US legal tentacles and Chinese spying for the reasons you describe, but given China's attitude towards intellectual property enforcement I'd be able to use it to store all my DRM-free music, movies and TV shows without worrying about being prosecuted for doing so - and give access to my family and friends besides!
I still wouldn't use it to replace my local storage though, more as an access-anywhere adjunct. Not to mention that with my ISP data usage plan at 150 GB per month it would take me over 2 months to upload that much...
Actually, I can see the copyright lobby giving birth to dinosaur-sized kittens over this, because inevitably the most popular use of such a generous storage space allocation will be pirate downloads on a scale to make even bittorrent pale into insignificance!
Hey - I don't see an issue with using it as an online storage / backup for my thousands of photographs. What should I care if 'they' want to look at them - whoever 'they' may be?
I would never store sensitive documents of any kind in the Cloud, no matter who owned the server or where it was located. That would be just foolish
With appropriate encryption of my own choice, why not?
The fact is that I would trust Google or Amazon about the same as I'd trust a random Chinese company. You think the US couldn't just subpoena them and get my data already? That's precisely the scandal in the news at the moment.
But if you apply encryption YOURSELF to all data that goes to the cloud, then it honestly does not matter where it's stored. You could offer copies of it on street corners to random people. That's precisely the *point* of encryption.
In fact, I'd say, like the "sledgehammer to the server" test of your backups, if in theory you WEREN'T prepared to give encrypted copies of your data to anyone, then it probably means you have zero confidence in your backups / encryption and THAT'S the problem, not who you might give it to. Of course, you wouldn't, because they have no need, but in theory you should be able to without worry.
And if we're talking home use - well, unless you're doing something of concern to the Chinese, I can't imagine it's any worse than doing something of concern to the US. At least China doesn't demand that their law applies in the UK, for instance...