I caught an interesting observation on O’Reilly’s Radar. In my opinion there are two problems that web users should pay attention to. One, as noted on Radar, is privacy and the other is reliability of your service provider.

There are limits to what we can do about either of them as a company. We built Marela on a fault-tolerant system using solid hardware and think user’s data is reasonably safe from data loss and intrusions. Like others we can’t rule it out completely, but I think it was worth it to build a safer system than our competition even if users often don’t care (until it’s too late).

We also don’t collect any personal data we don’t actually need and don’t store what we do collect a minute longer than absolutely necessary. However, there’s little we can do about our legal obligations. Even though legislation in Slovenia is not quite the same as the one cited in the article, it’s still true that it’s easier for law-enforcement institutions to legally access your data (unknown to you) if it’s not residing on your personal computer. We are eating our own dog food, so this doesn’t make us happy either.

I still think it’s dumb to have all your data stored only on your personal computer, especially since vast majority of computer users seldom if ever make backups. Encryption can go a long way in protecting data from prying eyes, but what I wish most is simply for people to be more aware.

Without awareness there’s little hope for improving the legislation and practices of our industry.