Why should you be looking for an alternative to Dropbox?
Simply put, it’s not secure.
Firstly, Dropbox fell victim to a security breach in 2012 where usernames and passwords were stolen, an employee account was compromised and user emails were used to disseminate spam. Ok, that’s not unusual these days. However, it took until 2016 for tech publication Motherboard to expose the full extent of the breach, and it was revealed to be 68milllion user accounts! (source: Motherboard)
Secondly, Dropbox has a terrible Privacy Policy. Dropbox actually keeps a copy of your encryption keys, which they use to access, scan, and share your files with third parties. This is all part of the Dropbox terms of service you must agree to, in order to use their service. Don’t believe me? Its right here in their terms of service.
Lastly, and if you want to go deeper, Edward Snowden revealed that Dropbox was marked as “coming soon” to the long list of high profile tech companies that handed over users’ data to the NSA (source: Washington Post). Incredibly, in April 2014 Dropbox even added former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to its Board of Directors. Snowden called Rice “probably the most anti-privacy official you can imagine.”.
Ok, that was heavy. So what do AltWorks recommend? –> Sync.com
Sync.com has been a favourite with connoisseurs of Cloud Storage services for some time now. Why? The main factors; price and security.
While pricing may be reasonably straight forward to gauge for most people, it’s really the security features of Sync that deserve to be highlighted here.
Sync is one of the few Cloud Storage providers that use a ‘zero-knowledge’ architecture. In brief, this means that your data is encrypted on your computer or device and remains encrypted, in traffic, and when stored on the Cloud service. Your data is not viewable at all by the service provider, and your password is never stored, and only known by you. For a more thorough explanation on zero-knowledge in the Cloud, have a look at this guide.
An additional benefit for the privacy minded, is that its data centre located in Canada, which has some of the best privacy laws in the world.
While Sync doesn’t have the application integration of like Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive do, this has to be a compromise made because of the tight control over your content. Otherwise, Sync seriously competes, with a solid feature set in both personal and business plans.
We highly recommend checking out Sync.com, and at very least give their free 5GB account a test drive.
For Australian business users, AltWorks are now able to provision Sync Pro accounts for you at competitive rates. We can also bundle Sync Pro accounts as part of our many services. Contact AltWorks today!
