I recently wrote about the U.S. intelligence chiefs’ recent Q&A session at the National Security Summit in Washington D.C., and how they seemed annoyed that the public’s response to the news that their most private communications had been spied on, for years and without suspicion or warrant, was cynicism and distrust.

The premise of their argument was thus—to protect you, we need to see what you’re doing.

This should worry you, because these directors and Generals are advocating that technology companies include ‘back doors’ in their products; meaning that the Government could access user data, when and how they want. The trouble with this is the widely accepted principle that in order to introduce a back door, cryptography experts would have to introduce a vulnerability. Believe me when I say, there is no safe way to put a hole in an encryption product. Your data would be introduced to huge risk.

Even if you’re not an American citizen, or if you’re a business that operates solely within the European Union, the views and ambitions of the U.S. intelligence community directly affect you, given that most online services, such as Office 365, are operated by U.S. companies.

Now, whilst I don’t think that anybody should be surprised about their callous approach to privacy, it does add reinforcement to the growing view that only ‘zero-knowledge’ systems can give users real privacy, and by extension real security.

The idea behind zero-knowledge privacy is simple, to remove any possibility of data being compromised—whether by accident, malicious actor, or warrant—the data is encrypted, and the service provider doesn’t see, store, or own the key.

By removing the opportunity for compromise, users’ remove the major sources of risk to their most valuable asset; their data.

Whether you need to comply with industry regulations, want to lower your corporate risk, or have clients that expect you to employ leading-edge security, zero-knowledge services should be your ‘go-to’ for real information assurance.

Whether you’re a medical practitioner, lawyer, architect or accountant, you’re probably already using cloud services (whether you know it, or not). You probably think that there are no alternatives to the big, American firms that control your information today. But there are.

At Nimbox, we’ve been building secure products since before the Snowdon leaks, based on the principle that you, and only you, should have access to your data. Our services provide more features than their competitors, are more secure than most services on the planet, and will cost you less.

Try our secure file sharing, backup and online storage service free for 14 days, and see how we are better for your business than Microsoft and Dropbox.