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The fact is that Apple and Amazon have far more confused customers than targets for social engineering attacks. They are always going to have an "I forgot every

The fact is that Apple and Amazon have far more confused customers than targets for social engineering attacks. They are always going to have an "I forgot everything about myself and my account, please let me in!" option. All cloud service providers are going to have this. With this in mind, it may not be wise to remotely link your MacBook such that it can be wiped by Apple Central Command. Do people seriously do that? A phone is maybe kind of reasonable for this kind of thing (only kind of), but your actual laptop? Is this a requirement of new versions of OS X or something? I don't know who would set this up willingly. Any local data that you want to keep from attackers should be stored as ciphertext. Your secret key should be encrypted with a strong passphrase. Most thieves, even high-level corporate espionage-type thieves, won't know how to use GPG in the first place, but if they do, if you've done it right they won't be able to get in. From the perspective of keeping ourselves safe in a world where all data is kept on (or hooked up to a remote control at) the server of a big faceless corporation, all plaintext should be considered public info. Just because they haven't published or leaked it yet doesn't mean they won't, and it doesn't mean that anyone with an interest can't go in and take it, or that they won't wreak havoc for an ultimately minor goal (like access to Twitter). Encryption and backup. The two constantly repeated, never honored mantras whose inconveniences have plagued computer users for decades now. If people did these things correctly, hacks would rarely matter or jeopardize significant amounts of data. This is a field that is ripe for system-level disruption; Time Machine kind of helped with the backup, but we still don't have anything decent for layman's crypto (perhaps because the business models of companies are now so dependent on reading our information and selling it back to interested parties).

Someone 14y ago
"Encryption and backup. [...] If people did these things correctly, hacks would rarely matter [...] This is a field that is ripe for system-level disruption" Encryption and backups set in stone. An attacker may not be able to read your encrypted backups, but if he can delete them, you still won't be happy. I think the only feasible solution is that of online, write-only backups. They need to be online so that devices can backup themselves when they deem that necessary; you cannot trust users to do any manual backup task. They need to be write-only because, otherwise, with online backups, an attacker could wipe all your backups. Semi-write only, in the form of "deleting backups older than a year" or "delay any deletes by a month" (to give the user time to report his phone to be stolen) or "delete only after three-factor authentication" probably is acceptable. "perhaps because the business models of companies are now so dependent on reading our information and selling it back to interested parties" I think it is because online backup looks too pricey. People keep comparing the price of online storage to that of hard disks. For example Dropbox is about $1 per GB of storage per year. You can buy a SSD disk or a laptop for less than $1 per GB of storage. As this example shows, current solutions also do not protect well against attacks. I am not sure that the options of having your own cloud, or of making a cloud with others (peer-to-peer backups) will make sense to Joe consumer. Users may not want yet another device at home, likely will not have the upload bandwidth (yet), and are a risk factor with respect to operations on such a device. A home device probably would have to be a custom device, not a PC. Users cannot be trusted to operate it in ways that keeps their data secure, so you must make it impossible for them to operate it.

Someone 14y ago

"Encryption and backup. [...] If people did these things correctly, hacks would rarely matter [...] This is a field that is ripe for system-level disruption" Encryption and backups set in stone. An attacker may not be able to read your encrypted backups, but if he can delete them, you still won't be happy. I think the only feasible solution is that of online, write-only backups. They need to be online so that devices can backup themselves when they deem that necessary; you cannot trust users to do any manual backup task. They need to be write-only because, otherwise, with online backups, an attacker could wipe all your backups. Semi-write only, in the form of "deleting backups older than a year" or "delay any deletes by a month" (to give the user time to report his phone to be stolen) or "delete only after three-factor authentication" probably is acceptable. "perhaps because the business models of companies are now so dependent on reading our information and selling it back to interested parties" I think it is because online backup looks too pricey. People keep comparing the price of online storage to that of hard disks. For example Dropbox is about $1 per GB of storage per year. You can buy a SSD disk or a laptop for less than $1 per GB of storage. As this example shows, current solutions also do not protect well against attacks. I am not sure that the options of having your own cloud, or of making a cloud with others (peer-to-peer backups) will make sense to Joe consumer. Users may not want yet another device at home, likely will not have the upload bandwidth (yet), and are a risk factor with respect to operations on such a device. A home device probably would have to be a custom device, not a PC. Users cannot be trusted to operate it in ways that keeps their data secure, so you must make it impossible for them to operate it.