Thomas J. West Music

Yesteday, the computer-user website MakeUseOf posted a news article entitled Dropbox Accidentally Drops Passwords for Four Hours. In it, they explain that Dropbox lost password protection for 1% of their users for four hours and how to determine if your Dropbox account has been visited by unathorized users.

Dropbox is quite simply the most useful web 2.0 and cloud storage service I use. I use it daily. To hear that they were vulnerable to something as bizarre as password protection simply disappearing was a bit disconcerting at first. It's a reminder of a simple fact: any data you make available online, no matter how protected it is, has the potential to be accessed by someone other than yourself.

The simple answer to this, of course, is to not put any data in a cloud storage service that you don't want other people to access. Services like Dropbox and Google Docs, however, are becoming indispensable tools for collaboration with people for all kinds of projects. I recently wrote an article entitled The Power Of Online Collaboration detailing four different projects that I was using cloud-based services to collaborate with fellow music teachers. Online collaboration is incredible and definitely the way to do business in today's technology-driven world.

One Solution: Encrypt Your Data

When MakeUseOf posted their article on Facebook, several users commented on the thread about a free open-source application called True Crypt that they use to add quick on-the-fly encryption to any file on their computer before they upload it to the cloud. I have not installed the program yet, but at first glance it looks like a great application.

Data encryption can be cracked, of course, as any episode of NCIS will tell you, but unless you are hosting documents online that could make or break your business, it is unlikely that anyone is going to want your data badly enough to invest the time to crack the encryption. And really, if you have data that is that sensitive, you should be finding a different way to share it with collaborators.

I currently have a storage problem with my desktop computer (as in, the hard drive is miniscule by today's standards), and once I solve that little issue, I'm going to be spending some time backing up files and encrypting a few of my commerical Finale files.

Bottom line: be mindful of what you put online, even if it is password protected. The simple fact is that there are millions of pages of content created for the web every hour of every day, and that someone would need to have a pretty specific reason to search out your data or your online messages for anyone to find your stuff. Other than the random nature of hackers, malware programmers, and spammers, anyone else (like a potential employer or a business competitior) would have to have a vested interest in your data to seek it out.

This article (c) 2011 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

Subscribe by RSS Subscribe by email