What is often referred to as “The Cloud” has created a variety of products and solutions to problems that simply weren’t feasible with on-site storage for the average user. But the savvy internet user will tell you that the real innovation behind the cloud is little more than increased bandwidth. A popular internet meme contends that there is no cloud, and your photos are simply stored on “someone else’s computer”.
Those privacy concerns have given rise to several privacy focused cloud based storage solutions. Sync is one of those services, and they are taking one more step towards user privacy by allowing customers to pay in bitcoin. Bitpay will act as their Bitcoin payment processor.
Sync touts end-to-end encryption, and they claim to have no access to any user files because of that. Credit card information is notoriously unsafe however, even when it is encrypted [see: Ashley Madison] so by allowing customers to remove that information entirely, they have potentially increased their privacy.
“With Bitcoin, our customers can enjoy absolute privacy in the cloud for both their data and payments.” said Sync CEO Thomas Savundra in a press release.
Privacy is clearly the focus behind the Canadian-based Sync, per their “Privacy page”
“‘Zero-knowledge’ means we absolutely cannot access the encrypted data stored on our servers. Your data is completely safeguarded from unauthorized access, which is the only way you can completely trust the cloud. Protecting your right to privacy is our passion.”
They also have a fairly extensive “privacy” white paper that lays out the basics of their encryption. They also recently added two factor authentication, critical for any service attempting to secure their users’ data.
There is no doubt that the increased bandwidth of the past decade or so has enabled files to be stored in a more effective way than simply putting the same files on the hard drives of all of your devices. But the increasing technological capabilities of blackhat hackers and snooping desires of the “Five Eyes” governments has also given rise to concerns over privacy, perhaps to a level unseen since the NSA vs the Cypherpunks in the Clipper Chip wars.
Sync claims to have over 100,000 users and received a favorable Beta review from CloudStorageBuzz.com. We have reached out to Sync for comment and will have more as it becomes available.