Who do you trust with your personal data -- and why?

Earlier today Mike Williams wrote about a cloud storage provider which is offering a whopping 1TB of space for free, plus a further gigabyte for every day you use the service. It’s a stunning offer and one that should have us all signing up immediately. But most of us are familiar with the saying, "if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is", and 1TB+ of space -- for free -- certainly fits that description.

There are reasons for alarm bells to sound. The company behind Yunio, Shanghai Kui Zhi Internet Technology Co., Ltd, is based in China, and its terms of service are currently all in Chinese, so unless you speak the language, or trust Google’s translation, you can’t immediately be sure of what it will, or won’t, do with your data. And, because you’ve likely never heard of the company, how sure can you be that your data is safe, and the firm won’t go out of business?

rsmurf’s comment under Mike’s story summed up my initial reaction:

Sure......... I'm going to use a Chinese data storage service. What could possibly go wrong??????? NOT.

If it was Google, or Microsoft offering such a deal, would we be as wary? (Flickr offers 1TB of free space for photos, but that’s different from just offering space to use how you like). Yet why should we mistrust a Chinese company simply because it’s in China, and thus something of an unknown quantity?

What’s to say Yunio isn’t more trustworthy than American firms who may, or may not, allow government snoopers to rummage through your data.

Obviously cloud storage offered by Google, Microsoft and other tech giants is going to be secure, and we know those firms have the infrastructure in place to ensure there’s little to no chance of data going missing. Those behemoths aren’t likely to go bust any time soon either, which is reassuring, but then Yunio was first launched in 2011, and it seems safe enough as well.

My question to you is this: when it comes to storing your data in the cloud, who do you trust, and why? Do you commit yourself to one company, or is your data uploaded to multiple services to avoid having all your eggs in the one basket.

More importantly, is the promise of huge amounts of free space enough to persuade you to use a cloud storage company, even if you don’t actually know anything about them? Or do you prefer to stick with a company you’re familiar with -- a name you know -- even if the amount of space on offer is a lot less. If Yunio was an American company, would you be more willing to sign up?

I’d love to know your views.

Photo Credit: phloxii/Shutterstock

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