> I see no advantage to sharing the data in the cloud, vs just storing > it locally in your phone. You have to look at this from the perspective of the relia

> I see no advantage to sharing the data in the cloud, vs just storing > it locally in your phone. You have to look at this from the perspective of the reliability and integrity of digital evidence. If the data is stored locally it could be argued that it's possible that you have tampered with it, particularly since you possess the skill set necessary to do so. On the other hand, if it is stored on the cloud, it's likely that you won't have the level of access required to tamper with the data, and that there will be an auditable transaction history with information about the identity of anybody that made changes. Google will be able to provide information to the court on the level of security that applies to the data -- in fact, data from Google services is already known to be legally admissable assuming it passes relevance, reliability and integrity tests. Of course, you might be able to create something similar locally, but it's more complicated and untested: you'd need to be able to prove that you don't have the ability to retroactively amend the data (write access, encryption keys, etc). I agree that it would be nicer if: the digital evidence wasn't accessible by others and was also reliable and with integrity protection. Maybe an option would be to encrypt it with your public key and write it into a public blockchain?