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Deduplication, encryption, security and... Dropbox

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Armando:
Dropbox sacrifices user privacy for cost savings ?

That's what this article is trying to demonstrate.
Interesting read and, while I'm no security expert, it seems to me that the implications go beyond this :

As Ashkan Soltani was able to test in just a few minutes, it is possible to determine if any given file is already stored by one or more Dropbox users, simply by observing the amount of data transferred between your own computer and Dropbox's servers. If the file isn't already stored by Dropbox, the entire file will be uploaded. If Dropbox has the file already, just a few kb of communication will occur.
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f0dder:
On a related note:

Why SpiderOak doesn't de-duplicate data across users (and why it should worry you if we did)

One of the features of SpiderOak is that if you backup the same file twice, on the same computer or different computers within your account, the 2nd copy doesn't take up any additional space. This also applies if you have several versions of a file as it evolves over time -- we only need to save the new data blocks.

Some storage companies take this de-duplication to a second level, and do a similar form of de-duplication across all the data from all their customers. It's a great deal for the company. They can sell the bytes of storage to every user at full price while incurring zero additional cost. In some ways its helpful to the user too -- uploads are certainly faster when you don't have to transfer the data!-https://spideroak.com/blog/20100827150530-why-spideroak-doesnt-de-duplicate-data-across-users-and-why-it-should-worry-you-if-we-did
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...there's more in the blog article the quote is from.

Armando:
Thanks f0dder. SpiderOak implements it the right way it seems.
I saw that you were already aware of that when I checked that post in that SpiderOak thread.  :)

f0dder:
Yup, thought it was worth mentioning here as well :)

tomos:
another one = amazon cloud:

Food for thought... No privacy on Amazon's cloud drive.

Less so than other cloud storage?
-Cloq (April 12, 2011, 08:04 PM)
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I'll just throw this out there:
Does it really bother you though ? :)


[edit] on rereading the article, and thinking about it a bit, you dont have to answer that question ;-) I guess I'm sort of relaxed about it myself, cause the important stuff I have on Dropbox is encrypted (locally) [/edit]

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