Encryption Works

U.S. government whistleblower Edward Snowden made a splash on Monday, speaking at SXSW via videoconference about a broad range of topics related to privacy, data security, and encryption.

Snowden, along with panel moderators Ben Wizner and Chris Soghoian, lamented the lack of options when it came to the general public and cloud services. Soghoian said that average users “have to choose between a service that is easy to use […] or a tool that is highly secure and impossible for the average person to use.”

This is perhaps where we politely disagree. The Sync platform is designed with security at its very core. All the data transmitted to us is encrypted first — by your computer, phone, or tablet. The fact that computing power has grown so much over the last several years makes encryption — essentially a complicated math problem — not only fast and convenient, but very, very strong.

“Any cryptographer [or] any mathematician in the world will tell you that the math is sound,” Snowden said. “That is going to continue to be the case, I think, until our understanding of mathematics and physics changes fundamentally.”

Secondly, with Sync’s encrypted, zero-knowledge environment, you’d be excused if you thought storing data was difficult. In reality, it’s as easy as dragging and dropping. You can upload files in our web-based control panel, or just have Sync watch a folder on your hard disk to keep an encrypted copy on our servers.

We see our product as just the first in a broad array of tools that move data around the internet in entirely secure ways. It’s the first plank in a platform that makes it easy to back up your data for safekeeping, but yet keep private information private.