Online Storage of Your Private Data

Онлайн-хранилища ваших пиватных данных

There's a lot of talk these days about how convenient it is to store your data in the internet "cloud." Why store your calendar or contacts list or critical documents on one computer, or buy a hard drive to back up your files at home, when you can store them "in the cloud" and access them from anywhere using services like Google Calendar, or Google Docs, or remote backup services that will store copies of all your files for you? Well, here's a reason: the government can easily subpoena that data from those providers, with no notice to you.

As we already described in the "What Can The Government Do?" section, the communications stored by your communications service providers are very weakly protected compared to those you store yourself: after 180 days (or after you've downloaded a copy, according to the DOJ), the government can get those communications with only a subpoena and usually with no notice to you. But the situation is even worse when it comes to data that you store with someone other than your communications provider — so called "remote computing services" (RCSs). Under the Stored Communications Act, the government can obtain data that you send to an RCS for storage or processing with only a subpoena regardless of how old it is, and although the government is supposed to notify you before they do, the law makes it very easy for investigators to delay that notice until after they've gotten your data.

Therefore, storing all that data yourself, on your own computers — without relying on RCSs — is the most legally secure way to handle your private information. If you do choose to store copies of your files online, though, we strongly recommend encrypting those files yourself before you do (visit our article on disk and file encryption[создать] to learn how), or using services like IDrive or MozyPro that give you the option of encrypting your files using your own private encryption key.

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