Digital security in 2023 is not just for big businesses. The individual is just as much at risk for security breaches as a small business. Hackers aren’t the only ones with their eyes all over our personal information and our private photos, Big Tech loves to scan every single picture stored on their servers. This is often disguised as a quality-of-life feature in some way or another, but services are never truly provided for free. Your iCloud searches and Google Photo servers are testing out their facial recognition software and AI imager parsers on your photos every minute of the day. How can we store our memories without unwanted eyes? What privacies have we traded for so-called convenience?
Privacy
Starting with your privacy, Big Tech has all but stripped privacy away from us these days. The storage methods that many of us consent to use simply because they are the first option offered come at a steep personal cost. Your metadata, your face, and the photos you take at dinner are constantly being monitored in service of Big Tech’s bottom line.
The folders and search functions that tech companies like Google and Apple provide us come at a deep personal cost. Photos of your friends and family members are being scanned at an alarming rate, creating a digital repository of information that they may not be comfortable with Big Tech having access to. The impressive AI-powered search functionality that Apple’s photo storage provides comes at the cost of allowing Apple to use your personal photographs as a testing ground for increasingly powerful and invasive artificial intelligence. These AI onlookers use that information to increase their abilities to parse and navigate the world around them, making them more profitable once tech companies are able to sell them off to law enforcement and the military-industrial complex. All of this, simply because we are given the impression that there is no other option.
Security
Your data should belong to one person. Yourself. To this end, storing your photos should be a secure experience from end to end. In-transit encryption, secure decentralized servers, and password-protect file sharing sessions should be the norm in the modern day. Hackers have come up with increasingly devious methods for dipping their hands into streams of data to extract information to which they have no rights. Should you be blackmailed by a stranger simply because your MMS ended up in the wrong inbox? How can you keep creeps out when they gain access to the servers on which your photos reside?
Security should be your number one priority when it comes to saving your photos and videos. With the right file storage service, you can send and receive photos in their original quality, with all of their metadata intact, and you can lock out any unauthorized recipients by disabling the share or password-protecting the session. Link-based file-sharing sessions are the way of the future. They are customizable with expiration dates and passwords, ensuring that the only person in charge of the share is the file owner.
Small photography businesses and personal photos and videos alike benefit from taking control of their files with a file-sharing service that respects the privacy of their content.
Convenience
Finally, we should remember that security is convenient. There is nothing more debilitating to everyday life and business alike than when a bad actor has access to your information. A mistyped recipient line, a wifi network that has been hijacked by a hacker, and a ransomware attack are only a few of the most common processes by which our information can be lost.
Further, proper storage of your photos and videos can drastically streamline the process by which your information can be shared. We all understand the woes of sharing high-quality wedding photos with a technologically illiterate uncle or grandparent. Using secure file-sharing services naturally provides us with the methods to quickly and easily share massive amounts of lossless data with users that may otherwise resort to something like an unsecured messaging service or an inferior sharing method that compresses and destroys the data we treasure.
Store and Share with AXEL Go
AXEL Go is not only a file-sharing service that understands the importance of protecting a suite of decentralized storage servers with professional-grade AES 256-bit encryption. We also understand that security and convenience should go hand in hand. By entrusting your most personal photos with a service that refuses to rifle through your information, we create a personal bastion of security that can be protected from every angle without the need for high-level tech knowledge. Our user experience design is intuitive and simple without sacrificing a single bit of security or privacy.
