As we upload more photos, documents and videos to the Web, we have to ask ourselves how much of that data really belongs to us.
That's the question many are now asking as a result of a change coming to iPhones. The debate has implications for online privacy and government surveillance, and underscores how the storage of our digital data has changed over time, a situation that raises concerns about how we should behave technologically.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me recap.
The uproar began in early August when Apple introduced a software tool for iPhones that aims to flag cases of child sexual abuse. That seems like a good measure, doesn't it? The tool will be included in Apple's next mobile software update this fall. Here's how it works: When photos from the device are uploaded to iCloud, Apple's online storage service, iPhones are scanned for a code linked to a database of known child abuse images. Upon finding a certain number of matches, an Apple employee reviews the photos before reporting them to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
However, some cybersecurity experts have claimed that this content marking system is invasive and violates people's privacy. They warned that Apple was creating a precedent that made it easier for countries with strong surveillance measures, such as China, to pass laws that could force the company to use the technology for other purposes, such as scanning for unfavorable political images. in the eyes of an authoritarian government.
“They've said they have no plans to do worse with that technology, but right now it's naively optimistic to believe that,” said Erica Portnoy, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit. .
In response to the backlash, Apple released a document last week explaining that the new system won't scan private iPhone photo galleries. In addition, the technology will stop working if users turn off iCloud backup of their iPhone pictures, a company spokesperson said.
But however this Apple episode plays out, it's a reminder of just how much our digital data storage has changed. In the past, most of us stored our digital photos on our personal computer drives and thumb drives. They belonged only to us.
We now increasingly store our documents and other data in “the cloud,” where big companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft host the data on their servers. With this, those companies obtained much more power over our information.
That brings me to something I've said before: It's a good idea to have an exit strategy for getting your data out of the cloud in case you want to leave it. All it takes is a little forethought.
In recent years, I have taken a hybrid approach of storing copies of my data online and offline so that I can take advantage of the cloud but also retain independent ownership of my data. My efforts culminated in the creation of an online home server, which is basically a private cloud.
Here's how I did it, along with other approaches to a hybrid approach to storing your data.
Hybrid Backup
Many of us have become accustomed to automatically backing up our data to Apple, Google, and Microsoft online servers. These cloud services are convenient, and using them ensures that your data is frequently backed up over the Internet.
However, the best practice is hybrid: store local copies on physical drives as well, according to Acronis, a data protection company. It's good to have a local backup for when there's no internet connection and you need immediate access to a file.
“It's surprising how few people follow a hybrid backup plan,” says Topher Tebow, Principal Cybersecurity Researcher at Acronis. "The objective of backups is to ensure data continuity, and that is not something that can be guaranteed with a single solution."
For me, having local copies is important for self-sufficiency reasons. What if I get tired of paying a company's cloud subscription fees? What if the company's servers are hacked? Or if the company changes the product in an unattractive way?
Without local backup, you could feel trapped in a company's ecosystem; the longer you put one off, the harder it will be to get your data out if you decide to leave. But only 17 percent of consumers take the hybrid approach, according to an Acronis survey last year.
Fortunately, creating a local backup isn't difficult. The first step is to back up all your digital information to another device.
For iPhone photos, the easiest option is to back up the images to a computer. On a Mac, you need to connect your iPhone, open the Apple Photos app, and import all your photos. On Windows, you can use the Windows Photos app to do the same thing. And if you want to be more thorough, you can back up all the data on your iPhone using the Finder tool on Mac or the iTunes app on Windows.
From there, you can back up your computer's data to an external drive that connects to your computer. Applications like Apple's Time Machine for Mac or File History for Windows will take care of the process.
Now that you've downloaded your photos from your phone, you can decide what to do from there, like deleting them from the cloud and moving them to another cloud service like Google Photos. Just remember that you should not be totally dependent on the next cloud.
The extreme configuration: a personal cloud
There is also an extreme version of hybrid backup, which is what I do, but I don't recommend it for everyone. It's all about setting up a network-attached storage device, which is a miniature server attached to your Internet router and gives you remote access to your data. It's like having a private cloud at home.
Building a server is not for the weak. For one, the software is not easy to use. On the other, it is not cheap. An Internet-connected storage device, such as the Synology DS220+, costs around $300, and hard drives must be purchased separately.
However, I found it to be well worth the investment and time. I connect my phone to my Mac every week to back up data to my computer, and when I'm sleeping, the Mac backs up its data to my miniserver.
It's not as seamless as a company's cloud storage, but it's pretty convenient; In addition, I was tired of paying for various subscriptions to cloud services.
A way out
Even if you take a hybrid storage approach, does that keep you from Apple's new content markup tool?
No, according to Matthew D. Green, a professor of cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, who has been a strong critic of Apple's move. There's no real loophole, he said, because some of the technology will reside in the phone's hardware, and there's nothing we can do to remove it.
The cryptographer said that, for the first time, he was contemplating switching to a phone running Google's Android software. That would mean taking all the photos he had stored in the Apple cloud.
“It's going to be very painful,” Green said. "I have 20,000 photos dating back to 2010. These are things I can't bear to lose."
Brian X. Chen is a consumer technology columnist. He reviews products and writes Tech Fix, a column on solving technology-related problems. Before joining The Times in 2011, he reported on Apple and the wireless industry for Wired. @bxchen