14 DAY TRIAL // Encryption has never been much of a glamorous subject and, while that's as true today as it has always been, the topic has been getting a lot of attention lately.
That's due to the recently revealed NSA ambitions of making online encryption useless at doing what it's supposed to do, namely keeping data private from the eyes of outsiders.
With a lot more people and companies putting their private data online, the security and privacy of that data is an important topic.
It is common knowledge though that the data stored by Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, and everyone else is not entirely private and can be handed over to the government, on request.
There are a couple of services that protect users from government intrusions, Mega and SpiderOak for example, but Box aims to do the same while still making it possible to collaborate on files and projects hosted by it.
It isn’t hard to make sure that the encryption key stays client-side and thus making it impossible, or at least very hard, for a company to see inside what you're storing. But it becomes very complicated if that key has to be shared with several users who need to work on the same files.
Box hasn't cracked the problem just yet, but it is thinking of ways of providing customers who want the extra security with a way of passing down the key management to them while still making Box as easy to use as ever.
This isn't a trivial issue and the company doesn't have a perfect solution yet, as Ars Technica reports, but it is working on it.
Box typically focuses on enterprise customers, who are less concerned about NSA snooping than private individuals. Still, there are plenty of companies out there which, for wholly legitimate reasons, would rather not have the US government access their internal documents.