The 10 Year Challenge: Privacy Edition
People all around the globe are sharing 10-year-old throwbacks in comparison with more recent photos of themselves on social media – possibly making the job easier for facial recognition AI. With the Privacy Day upon us on January 28th, there is no better time to assess the state of digital privacy, then and now.
Whether there is any weight to the claim that sharing our old picture alongside our new one for an internet meme could be used for sinister purposes, the fact that this is a part of the conversation now proves that we have come a very long way in privacy-consciousness.
The era of mass data collection
A couple of weeks ago, CSO collected the 18 biggest data breaches of the 21st century and found that 16 of these happened in the past 10 years. This is no surprise – nowadays, the sheer magnitude of personal data collected by private companies often exceeds what used to be available to entire governments; tracking has become a lot more sophisticated; big data helps predict consumer behavior better than ever.
We all remember the biggest scandals, of course – the Snowden report back in 2013 proved that mass surveillance by governments was not a conspiracy theory, but a reality. The Yahoo breach the same year, which affected 3 billion people, showed that Internet giants are not too big to fail when it comes to user security.
“Back in 2009, a legislation like the GDPR was just a dream”
There is hope, though. Back in 2009, implementing legislation like the GDPR, which offers unparalleled protections to individuals in the digital world, was just a dream; the first proposal for it would only be drafted 3 years later. In the past decade, security-focused companies have been growing both in number and in popularity. Consumers have realized that the best way to protect their data was to make sure that not even their service provider has access to it – something that end-to-end encryption puts in practice.
We’ve come a long way
Ten years ago, having a secure alternative to cloud storage solutions was just an idea that gave birth to Tresorit two years later. In the following eight years up until now we have been working hard to deliver on our promise to put security first without compromising on usability.
Just last year, we implemented new features like Access Logs and File Restore to push this goal forward, and released a free, end-to-end encrypted file sharing service that affirmed our mission of bringing privacy for all. To prove our commitment to data security; we achieved ISO 27001 certification. We were also awarded the Trusted Cloud label from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy based on our compliance with a set of rigorous security and data privacy criteria. Last but not least, we signed a Data Processing Agreement with many of our business clients to comply with the GDPR. And we shall not forget the €11.5M that we secured in Series B founding. With the help of the investment, we hope to empower many more customers to keep confidential documents safe in the cloud.
We hope to continue down on this road in the next decade, and hopefully, the next 10-year challenge will see us in a society where privacy comes first.
