Freedom worth protecting

The wonderful thing about free societies is that if there is something that enough people disagree with, those people are entitled – and some might even say obligated – to make a change. For issues large and small, the concept of “if you don’t like it, fix it” has been at the core of free and patriotic expression across the world.

This year, Canada Day and Independence Day fall in the same week: July first and fourth, respectively. On these days, we, as nations, celebrate our shared freedoms and reflect perhaps on the issues we can fix in our own lives that disagree with our idea of real freedom.

In the U.S. Constitution, the fourth amendment talks about “papers and effects” – effectively the 18th-century concept of data and information. People have the right to not have their information unjustly searched and seized. Section Eight of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms says the same thing.

Just this week, the Supreme Court ruled that that right extended to mobile phones, and the vast quantities of data they contain. While the founding fathers might not have envisioned a future where everyone carries a library in their pocket, the highest court in the United States affirmed that if police wanted to search someone’s phone, they needed to get a warrant – just as with a locked briefcase or sealed envelope.

Similarly, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled this week that police need a warrant in order to learn the identities of Internet users from their service providers. The ruling affirmed that anonymity and privacy are rights afforded to every Canadian Internet user.

We believe that today, our customers’ data – their “papers and effects” – are oftentimes their most important property. We treat it as such. We don’t rifle through their documents, extracting hints at what kind of advertisements they might click on. As we’ve mentioned repeatedly, all customer data arrives at our servers already encrypted. You lock the briefcase before you send it to us for safekeeping. We can’t see into the briefcase, and we’re fine with that.

As much as choice, trust is a big part of what keeps free societies free. If you copy your data to someone’s server, you’re trusting they won’t look through it, publicize it, or lose it. We deeply value the trust our customers place in us, of course, and we also have safeguards in place that very few of our competitors do – thanks to our unique zero-knowledge storage environment, we can’t see your data, even if we wanted to (which of course we don’t).

As we celebrate our freedom and independence, we should carefully look at the individuals and companies we trust – or at least those we think we trust – and consider carefully if they’re worthy of that trust. If not, we have the right to make a change.