IMO the platform and marketing is missing the one indispensable thing every new cloud storage provider must have given the political climate right now - full encryption. Snowden's "avoid Dropbox because they don't have encryption" comments are everywhere in media right now. This app may actually have it, but they don't mention anything about it or even security for that matter. Specifically when there's such a focus on "social" in their marketing copy, mentioning the other side of the spectrum (privacy) is imperative. Maybe I'm the only one thinking this though.
@colemercer Well put. I think now, more than ever, people would PAY to the peace of mind that comes will full encryption. I would.
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@colemercer I just read the terms and privacy policy. Side note: They are in Hong Kong.
In the terms, they basically say that they have to read your files in order to provide targeted advertising. I think we all assumed that, but just putting it out there. So, this means that files are not encrypted. They are using https on their site, so I'm hopefully that the data transfer is secure. cc @danielkempe@stttories
The terms also say that you have to have ALL rights associated with the content you're storing. So, I would assume you couldn't store any music, movies, or tv shows that you've "purchase"--you're really only renting them.
They also say that "excessive users" will be warned via email and potentially cut off from the service.
An interesting part of the Terms is that you are granting them full authority to do whatever it takes for them to get the files to you. This ranges from managing them to playing them back to you. So, one of my thoughts is, let's assume we could store music files on their service: what if they store a single music file and just keep tabs of whomever is authorized to access that file. So, 1,000 people all upload the same song, but on their servers they only store 1 copy of that song and just have a database with the 1,000 people that can access that song. This would help with the economics of the situation. cc @brackin
I think I had other thoughts, but I've since forgotten them.
@colemercer That's a fair comment. Hive uses the same AES encryption as Dropbox, but also like Dropbox we hold the keys so it's not a complete zero-knowledge service, nor do we pretend to be. As a free, unlimited cloud service, zero-knowledge encryption would require us to disable data de-duplication which is not economically feasible.
Privacy is extremely dear to us. Our servers are all hosted in Germany where privacy is taken seriously and nothing but a court order would require us to reveal user's data.
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They would do themselves a lot of good by releasing some mobile apps. Native Mac/Windows/Linux apps wouldn't hurt either...
@alexspencer Mobile apps should arrive in about a months time. There are no plans for desktop apps though - we'll continue to push our web app for that.
...but we have an API, so we may release that to the community in the future.
@lehartel: A question that has been in the air about Hive. What's your business model and how can you ensure that Hive won't disappear in a year being that it's almost too easy to have a free for life account?
The economics don't make sense to me. Your bet is that storage will keep getting cheaper, most users won't store much and some will pay for premium features. The problem is normal users don't hit storage limits, so your service is inherently for power-users, that will be much more costly and smaller in numbers.
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@brackin I don't see this as inherently for power users. It's an advertising supported, "free" service with (so far) an absence of any power-user targeted marketing. Free speaks to the masses, even when it's not really free, and I suspect they're after that crowd.
@lehartel Hi Thierry, thanks for jumping on here :)
I like the design and how easy it is to get started.
I love the unlimited cloud storage.
As of late I have been keen on questioning privacy policies for cloud solutions, so I encourage @lehartel and team to be very open about their privacy policy and where they stand relative to Dropbox. I saw @McCroden's comment and maybe it's a bit extreme to get into those details with your standard user, but totally worth it in the long haul.
Their promise seems ambitious, the app has a really nice design so I think it worths trying it out. I'm already adding some files in for testing purposes!
My beta link invite if anyone wants to try it out too: https://beta.hive.im/join/527/
I'm not sure I'd want to put my precious content and memories on a service with such a flimsy business model. Would rather pay something and know my stuff is going to be there 18 months from now.
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