The personal cloud has been a hit with a rise in consumers as its products are made available on smartphones and tablets.  It beats having to save all your files on a thumb drive, portable hard disk or copying your files to a DVD or CD, all of which could all be easily corrupted and physically damaged.  With such high demand for personal cloud, Dropbox is in talks with several investors for a possible $200-300 million dollar funding.  In terms of the company’s service of making your files easily available to you anytime, anywhere, Dropbox is valued to be worth $5 billion.  But in terms of your data’s security, should the company be valued that high?

Dropbox was under investigation from the FTC when consumers brought to surface evidence that files stored in Dropbox can be accessed by members of their team.  With that, Dropbox’s terms and conditioned were scrutinized which led to more angry consumers informing the company that that they will no longer use their service.  So to appease the angered mob, the company revised their terms and conditions by using Layman’s terms to explain how Dropbox works – think of it like a parent explaining something to a 3-year old.

We may need your permission to do things you ask us to do with your stuff, for example, hosting your files, or sharing them at your direction. This includes product features visible to you, for example, image thumbnails or document previews. It also includes design choices we make to technically administer our Services, for example, how we redundantly backup data to keep it safe. You give us the permissions we need to do those things solely to provide the Services. This permission also extends to trusted third parties we work with to provide the Services, for example Amazon, which provides our storage space (again, only to provide the Services).

But even with the revisions, it still doesn’t mean that all your files are 100% secured.  As consumers, we cannot rely on Dropbox’s security measures, we have to put out own locks on it, just like when you’re moving in a new apartment, you either change the locks or put on additional locks, just to be sure of your own safety.

Some recommended programs to keep your data safe are BoxCryptor, TrueCrypt and SecretSync.  These programs work by encrypting or putting your own code on the data that you wish to store on personal cloud.  So with that encryption plus the cloud’s own encryption, it will be harder for people to access your files.  With that in mind, sensitive information is best left out of the cloud as hackers are lurking everywhere, ready to strike anytime.