Edward Snowden has urged individuals and businesses to stop using cloud storage service Dropbox claiming that the service is “hostile to privacy”.
In an interview with The Guardian, the whistleblower has claimed that Dropbox is a “targeted, wannabe PRISM partner” and has called former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice “probably the most anti-privacy official you can imagine.”
Snowden isn’t happy with the cloud storage company appointing Rice to its Board of Directors as she was one of the several people in charge of overseeing the Stellar Wind program under which the NSA collected email and internet use records of millions of users.
Immediately after the appointment of Rice on the board, grassroots campaign demanding boycott of Dropbox through ‘Drop Dropbox’ slogan was initiated because of Rice’s strong support for warrantless wiretapping.
Snowden said that users and businesses should use cloud storage providers who have no way of accessing their customers’ data.
Giving an example of Spideroak, a company which claims to have ‘zero knowledge’ of what customers store on its servers, Snowden said that the only way a company can be trusted with data is if the company deprives itself “of the ability to read the information, of the ability to sort of analyse and manipulate the information without the customers’ consent or authorization.”
Spideroak encrypts user data and the decryption key is only available with the customers and that’s why the cloud storage company claims that no one at the company can actually decode the data residing on its servers.
“Spideroak has structured their system in such a way you can store all of your information on them with the same sort of features that Dropbox does, but they literally had have no access to the content”, Snowden added.
Following Snowden’s interview, Dropbox has issued a statement wherein it has claimed that safeguarding data and information of its customers is a top priority at the company.
“We were not involved in PRISM, and would resist any program of its kind. We’ve made a commitment in our privacy policy to resist broad government requests, and are fighting to change laws so that fundamental privacy protections are in place for users around the world”, the statement from Dropbox read.
