How to Pick the Best Cloud Storage App to Store Your Private Videos and Photos

Whenever we want to pick a cloud storage app, one of the first concerns in our minds is “How can I make sure nobody else can access my videos uploaded to cloud storage?”. Here is a brief answer for this critical question. (There are many aspects of picking the best cloud storage app, in this short post, we will only focus on privacy aspect)

Modern storage apps generally use solid encryption techniques to encrypt customer data to avoid unwanted access to the data. However, you may still want to review the cloud app’s security flow to understand who can potentially access your media. If the encryption keys and encrypted videos are stored in the same system, it means that owners of that system can potentially access your data (We are not saying that system owners will access customer data, we are only saying that it’s technically possible). That is why, for instance, PieCloud keeps encryption keys in iPhone keychain, and stores the encrypted videos in AWS S3.

As you can see from the diagram above, nobody other than the iPhone owner can access both encrypted data and encryption keys together, hence nobody can see the raw customer data.

One another aspect of privacy is sharing the uploaded video directly from cloud storage (some cloud storage apps support sharing). Whenever sharing is involved, there is a risk of enabling unwanted access to the data. That could be caused by software bugs, or user errors (i.e. the person you shared the data with might accidentally leak your data).