Thanks to the Edward Snowden revelations, which every day seem to provide further reasons to look over your digital shoulder, the internet community is beginning to realize that the seeming freedom offered by so many “free” service providers is not without its caveats.
When Facebook isn’t actively selling your personal information, some hacker is breaking into it. But now there’s a product that wants to put control back in the hands of the users, or more specifically, their boxes.
Developed by a former Microsoft engineer, Pixeom is a mobile 16GB SD cloud storage box, that comes with built-in e-commerce, file-sharing and social networking services that connect with other Pixeom devices across the world and are controlled entirely by the user.
”The public cloud services are all built on the foundation of the data center, and it’s a treasure trove of personal information that’s vulnerable to data breaches, or vulnerable to being accessed by the service providers, because they create their own encryption keys which lets them access your data,” says co-founder and CEO Samir Nagar.
With Pixeom, on the other hand, users can limit access to stored information and don’t have to worry about third-party intrusion. “Data centers are a thing of the past. It’s time that users had total control over their personal storage and security. We should be allowed to own our data, make our own rules, and keep our privacy when we want it,” says Nagar.
In order to really take off, Pixeom will need to pass a certain threshold for usership. But with unlimited storage potential and a high-privilege on security — which 96% of users say is the most important thing they look for in cloud storage, according to a recent Peer1 study — there’s good reason to think it will. Over 500 backers on Kickstarter agreed, when they surpassed the startups fundraising goals by almost 50%.
