Only the person who has the account can access the files and see what is in them. Nowadays, it is common for cloud providers such as Apple with their iCloud service to encrypt your files so that no-one at the company can read them. The idea is to ensure privacy on all levels. We have a clue in the above “About Us” paragraph: “for which strong end-to-end encryption is an essential prerequisite, now seems grossly insufficient.”Įssentially, the business model from the get-go with MEGA has been to provide a secure way for end users to upload their files such that the company hosting them could not have access to them. We will get more into MEGA’s strange history below, but let us look first as to what MEGA actually provides. Anything short of security by design (”we cannot gain access to your data without you being able to find out”), for which strong end-to-end encryption is an essential prerequisite, now seems grossly insufficient.”Įdward Snowden? Global mass surveillance by rogue governments? Data Encryption and Privacy: The Number One Purpose of MEGA Edward Snowden’s revelations 137 days later fundamentally changed public attitudes and it became excruciatingly clear that security by policy (”we have access to your data, but we promise to keep it confidential and not misuse it”) had not been good enough. “When we launched MEGA early 2013, global mass surveillance by rogue governments under the pretext of fighting terrorism was still a wild conjecture and its proponents were often touted as conspiracy theorists. The only hint as to the strange story behind MEGA and MEGAsync is the About Us intro, which starts: On the About Us page, you will see friendly photos of the MEGA team. It is simply a cloud storage service for your personal files, just like many others, such as Dropbox, Microsoft’s OneDrive, or Box.com. On the surface, if you go to the MEGA website, you will see nothing out of the ordinary.

Megasync software