Cloud industry standard best practices recommend encrypting all data uploaded to the Cloud as a default measure. No personal data should be written to Cloud disks unless it is protected by strong, client side encryption using keys the Cloud provider does not have access to. If it is anything less, Cloud providers will automatically scan your files for content they deem inappropriate, illegal, immoral, or objectionable. It happens everyday and has been going on for years at Cloud services ranging from Google’s Picasa to DropBox.
We shouldn’t be going back to the bad old days where our servers were open to man in the middle attacks due to lack of TLS on connections to the server. Industry standard best practices should be the minimum we expect from a newly launched product that could expose our data to Amazon, hackers, Plex, or lawyers looking to sue over what might be in the Cloud disks. Encryption is not negotiable.
tl;dr Plex Cloud exposes our files to Amazon scanning processes and fingerprinting software unless those files are encrypted. Please add strong, client side encryption to protect us from scanning that is already going on at Cloud providers across the internet.
It is a fair point that Cloud providers need to make a profit and Bitcasa is an example of what not to do. I don’t want to think about what I lost there.
I don’t know that Cloud providers depend on deduplication or similar technologies for their margins though. In most cases, using my family as an example, the data generated wouldn’t be deduplicated anyway even without encryption. Photos/videos taken with phones, voice memos, tax returns, film projects from school using footage she shot with a dashcam style camera, and more for hundreds of gigabytes. That is a typical, home user generating data they need a secure place to put. That is increasing rapidly as 4K video is adopted and hundreds of gigabytes becomes 10TB+.
It is similar to how residential ISPs oversell to profit. Most users don’t use as much as they are actually allocated, some use a lot more, and targeting the most abusive users keeps things under control. Profit after costs. Amazon is doing the same at scale doing what Bitcasa probably couldn’t. Amazon is larger on the scale of Walmart and hosts huge parts of the internet including parts of Netflix.
Encryption is becoming the norm rather than the exception for more users as desktop and sync apps adopt it for their next paid version. Plex needs to be skating to where the puck will be rather than where it is.
Came here to ask about encryption / tokenization of data living in amazon cloud drive… very pleased to see that I’m not the first asking whether or not this will be implemented.
Also, as i’ve got unlimited amazon cloud drive basically wasted atm since i’ve not yet got anything that hooks into it… any chance there’s some kind of structure on the amazon side to silo which services are allowed in which directories?
That’s all well and good, but the cloud server will have no way of reading your encrypted data and streaming it back to you. The solution has to be driven by Plex, to some degree, even if it’s only partnering with some readily available software.
For clarification, as some posts here read as if the posters want the connection between client and ACD to be encrypted.
**This connection already is secure and encrypted. **
The thing most of the users here are concerned about is the encryption of the cloud storage, which, in fact has to be a application-driven (in this case PLEX-driven) solution, as this application has to ready the files.
Maybe there’s a possibility for PLEX to add something like a veracrypt-container-reader, and the possibility to enter the password for this containers in the plex.tv-webApp (server-configuration for PLEX Cloud).
PLEASE put in full disk encryption on ACD. I don’t allow my drives at home to not be encrypted, there’s no chance I’d use ACD unless it was fully encrypted.
