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"All pictures you transfer to Memoto’s cloud service are stored encrypted. The pictures are only visible to you: only you can see them and only you can change t

"All pictures you transfer to Memoto’s cloud service are stored encrypted. The pictures are only visible to you: only you can see them and only you can change them." Is this real client side encryption, or is it Dropbox/Hushmail style encryption where they can do a little server side trickery in order to obtain your encryption key if the US government compels them to? I'm just thinking how useful it would be to law enforcement if they could just specify a location, date and time and go through pictures taken there for evidence. I hate this whole idea. It's inevitable that it will happen, but I hate it nonetheless. You wont be able to go outdoors without being constantly recorded by strangers. My only hope is that the popular services manage the technology such that we don't end up with databases that governments, or organisations can read private data from.

lmm 14y ago
I think the best to hope for is the opposite: that all the databases are publicly available, so at least we have equal access, and high-ranking politicians are just as exposed as everyone else. The world is changing. When it's this easy and cheap to record everything that happens in public and put it in a searchable database, people will do it. You can't stop the tide.
- mike-cardwell 14y ago
  I still think the best to hope for is that only the individuals with the actual devices are able to look at the data. Can you imagine future potential employees being able to type your name into a web page, getting an image of you, and then through the magic of facial recognition, seeing a long list of geo tagged photos of you going about your normal daily life? Who you associate with, where you go, etc. We shouldn't support this project or projects like this unless we get full assurances that the privacy issues have been tackled appropriately. At the moment, we don't know how the encryption is done, so as far as we should be concerned, there is none. No encryption. As far as I'm concerned, with the knowledge we currently have of the project, if this project becomes big, this is worse than for example: The government installing CCTV on every street corner, which automatically uploads data to a central database that they can peruse at will. These cameras will be in and on private property as well.
  - lmm 14y ago
    >Can you imagine future potential employees being able to type your name into a web page, getting an image of you, and then through the magic of facial recognition, seeing a long list of geo tagged photos of you going about your normal daily life? Who you associate with, where you go, etc. Easily, but what do you propose to do about it? Creating such a database will become easy and cheap; the technology is inevitable, and there will always be a large userbase who don't care much about privacy concerns; in the "worst" case a large company could hire a bunch of people to walk around taking pictures of everywhere. You could make taking the pictures illegal, but I don't like the implications of that one bit. Making aggregating them illegal would be very difficult to police and wouldn't stop governments. It probably wouldn't stop large corporations either (they'd do the processing offshore or find some other way around it). The way I see it there's no way to stop the big corporations getting this ability, so the best thing we can do is level the playing field.
  - JulianMorrison 14y ago
    You don't have to be on your camera, if you're on half a dozen strangers cameras who are all publishing their video, and I have an image mosaic algorithm and face recognition.
    - mike-cardwell 14y ago
      Yes. I was describing the best case scenario. Which is that only the people who take images have access to them. They will still publish a small number of them of course, like people already do with normal cameras. This is opposed to the worse case scenario where all images are automatically uploaded to a central database. If this is going to happen, that central database really needs to be encrypted such that only the user can access the images, not even the company that controls the database.
      - JulianMorrison 14y ago
        Yeah, but the point I was making, and that you missed, was that some fraction of people will voluntarily publish. They will set their photo album, or video feed, publicly readable. Because they want to. If that's a large percentage of people, it's going to be hard to avoid being on somebody else's camera, even if you don't have your own.
crucialfelix 14y ago
Maybe we need an industry that is the opposite of the search engine : the hide engine Obscurity.com -- disorganizing the worlds information
- TeMPOraL 14y ago
  And thus turning yet another thing into a waste of natural resources. It would be great if people figured out how to avoid zero-sum games as much as possible.
jadzhor 14y ago
Our goal is that all your data will be encrypted and completely secure from the point that they leave your camera until you view them in the app/website/etc. The images would only be your to decrypt and we would have no access to your key, only you will be able to view your images, unless you share them ofc. Our biggest concerns at the moment is partly how we can implement effective encryption/decryption that won't drain the battery life of your phone or decrease the user experience. Another concern is what will happen if the user loses their password? If we have no possibility to access a users encrypted data then their data would be lost in this case. We would also need to decrypt and reencrypt all data if the user changes password, something that would be very time/battery consuming if done on the device, instead of our servers. These concerns are something that we are evaluating solutions to as we speak, our goal is to make it impossible for anyone but you to access your private, aka. not shared, data. If you have any suggestions we are of course happy to hear them. /Dan Berglund, Software Developer @ Memoto
- mike-cardwell 14y ago
  The most important thing you need to do is to make your implementation completely transparent and publicly available. Data doesn't get more personal and private than the data you will be storing. Simply saying that you encrypt data is not enough. People need to know who has the keys and who is able to get access to the keys if they need to. Also, if the images can be viewed in a webpage, then they're not encrypted as far as I'm concerned. Even if you use client side javascript to handle the decryption, you can be compelled to modify that javascript for a particular user to obtain their key/password next time they log in. "We would also need to decrypt and reencrypt all data if the user changes password" This depends if you are using a key derived from the password. Or if you are using a randomly generated key that is encrypted using a key derived from the password. With the latter, you would only need to re-encrypt the randomly generated key. Not the entire data set. I understand that usability is important for your business case. Just don't forget how sensitive the data is that you will be collecting and how ripe for abuse it is if you don't secure it fully. I also think that you should open source your client software. If not, I'd be concerned that at some point you'll be forced to put back doors in it to get at peoples keys.
- 14y ago
hk_kh 14y ago
Man is a wolf to man

lmm 14y ago

I think the best to hope for is the opposite: that all the databases are publicly available, so at least we have equal access, and high-ranking politicians are just as exposed as everyone else. The world is changing. When it's this easy and cheap to record everything that happens in public and put it in a searchable database, people will do it. You can't stop the tide.

mike-cardwell 14y ago
I still think the best to hope for is that only the individuals with the actual devices are able to look at the data. Can you imagine future potential employees being able to type your name into a web page, getting an image of you, and then through the magic of facial recognition, seeing a long list of geo tagged photos of you going about your normal daily life? Who you associate with, where you go, etc. We shouldn't support this project or projects like this unless we get full assurances that the privacy issues have been tackled appropriately. At the moment, we don't know how the encryption is done, so as far as we should be concerned, there is none. No encryption. As far as I'm concerned, with the knowledge we currently have of the project, if this project becomes big, this is worse than for example: The government installing CCTV on every street corner, which automatically uploads data to a central database that they can peruse at will. These cameras will be in and on private property as well.
- lmm 14y ago
  >Can you imagine future potential employees being able to type your name into a web page, getting an image of you, and then through the magic of facial recognition, seeing a long list of geo tagged photos of you going about your normal daily life? Who you associate with, where you go, etc. Easily, but what do you propose to do about it? Creating such a database will become easy and cheap; the technology is inevitable, and there will always be a large userbase who don't care much about privacy concerns; in the "worst" case a large company could hire a bunch of people to walk around taking pictures of everywhere. You could make taking the pictures illegal, but I don't like the implications of that one bit. Making aggregating them illegal would be very difficult to police and wouldn't stop governments. It probably wouldn't stop large corporations either (they'd do the processing offshore or find some other way around it). The way I see it there's no way to stop the big corporations getting this ability, so the best thing we can do is level the playing field.
- JulianMorrison 14y ago
  You don't have to be on your camera, if you're on half a dozen strangers cameras who are all publishing their video, and I have an image mosaic algorithm and face recognition.
  - mike-cardwell 14y ago
    Yes. I was describing the best case scenario. Which is that only the people who take images have access to them. They will still publish a small number of them of course, like people already do with normal cameras. This is opposed to the worse case scenario where all images are automatically uploaded to a central database. If this is going to happen, that central database really needs to be encrypted such that only the user can access the images, not even the company that controls the database.
    - JulianMorrison 14y ago
      Yeah, but the point I was making, and that you missed, was that some fraction of people will voluntarily publish. They will set their photo album, or video feed, publicly readable. Because they want to. If that's a large percentage of people, it's going to be hard to avoid being on somebody else's camera, even if you don't have your own.

crucialfelix 14y ago

Maybe we need an industry that is the opposite of the search engine : the hide engine Obscurity.com -- disorganizing the worlds information

TeMPOraL 14y ago
And thus turning yet another thing into a waste of natural resources. It would be great if people figured out how to avoid zero-sum games as much as possible.

jadzhor 14y ago

Our goal is that all your data will be encrypted and completely secure from the point that they leave your camera until you view them in the app/website/etc. The images would only be your to decrypt and we would have no access to your key, only you will be able to view your images, unless you share them ofc. Our biggest concerns at the moment is partly how we can implement effective encryption/decryption that won't drain the battery life of your phone or decrease the user experience. Another concern is what will happen if the user loses their password? If we have no possibility to access a users encrypted data then their data would be lost in this case. We would also need to decrypt and reencrypt all data if the user changes password, something that would be very time/battery consuming if done on the device, instead of our servers. These concerns are something that we are evaluating solutions to as we speak, our goal is to make it impossible for anyone but you to access your private, aka. not shared, data. If you have any suggestions we are of course happy to hear them. /Dan Berglund, Software Developer @ Memoto

mike-cardwell 14y ago
The most important thing you need to do is to make your implementation completely transparent and publicly available. Data doesn't get more personal and private than the data you will be storing. Simply saying that you encrypt data is not enough. People need to know who has the keys and who is able to get access to the keys if they need to. Also, if the images can be viewed in a webpage, then they're not encrypted as far as I'm concerned. Even if you use client side javascript to handle the decryption, you can be compelled to modify that javascript for a particular user to obtain their key/password next time they log in. "We would also need to decrypt and reencrypt all data if the user changes password" This depends if you are using a key derived from the password. Or if you are using a randomly generated key that is encrypted using a key derived from the password. With the latter, you would only need to re-encrypt the randomly generated key. Not the entire data set. I understand that usability is important for your business case. Just don't forget how sensitive the data is that you will be collecting and how ripe for abuse it is if you don't secure it fully. I also think that you should open source your client software. If not, I'd be concerned that at some point you'll be forced to put back doors in it to get at peoples keys.
14y ago

hk_kh 14y ago

Man is a wolf to man