France fields an online storage service that is a privacy-focused European alternative

Article (French language / Langue Française)

RKube : le cloud français | Ere Numerique

From the horse’s mouth

RKube

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My Comments

The increased discontent in Europe about the NSA  spying on European citizens’ Internet activity has seen less trust in Internet services that are either hosted on American soil or chartered in the USA. This has also been augmented by recent activities where the German government “battened down the hatches” and even gave a CIA station chief located there the “royal order of the boot”.

As well, the French and Swiss worked on their own volume-wide disk encryption software such as VeraCrypt.

Similarly, the European Union recently won a European court case to assure EU citizens the “right to be forgotten” by major US-based search engines while an Austrian-based class action was launched against Facebook on privacy grounds.

Now the French have launched their own “cloud-driven” online storage as a competitor to the US-based online storage services like Dropbox, Box.com, OneDrive and Google Drive. Here, this operator have their servers on French soil and are totally subject to the rule of law in France. They also focus their offers around user privacy according to European norms. They even have the ability for you to create your own security key and implement secure anonymous file transfers.

Like most of the online storage services, they offer client-side software for Windows, Macintosh OS X, iOS and Android while offering a simplified Web user experience for those of us who come in from Web browsers.

RKube will offer users a free 5Gb account or access to up to 500Gb for up to €49.90 / month.

But I also wonder who else in Continental Europe will run with online file storage or similar services in response to the loss of faith in American services by Europeans. It also extends to other services like search engines or social networks. Similarly, it could be interesting to know whether people who live outside Europe but are concerned about the privacy or confidentiality of their data could end up purchasing space on these services rather than the American services.