Currently, we already have some companies that offer us privacy-focused products, such as Proton, Tutanota, Mullvad, and others, but a short while ago I found one that I’ve never seen anyone talk about called Ice Privacy. From what I’ve researched, they’ve been on this path since 2019 and currently have two services. The first is Ice Drive, a cloud drive that gives out 10GB for free (although I heard they reduced it to 3GB) and focuses on privacy, with features like end-to-end encryption and two-factor authentication. They store your files with zero-knowledge encryption, and they also offer lifetime plans. The other product is Ice VPN. I admit I haven’t researched this one as much, but from what I’ve seen, it’s a VPN that promises to keep as little user data as possible (something like MullvadVPN), and the data they do obtain is stored with 256-bit encryption. Their company is located in Gibraltar (a British Overseas Territory located in Europe), which has good privacy laws. The point of this post is to ask you guys if you’ve ever heard of Ice Privacy? I understand that when it comes to privacy, it’s good to choose companies that have been on the market for a long time and have the trust of their customers, but for a company to grow, someone needs to take the first step and use their products. I’m not saying we should just go out and use all their products and join the company’s ecosystem, but rather that we should add it to our arsenal of defense weapons regarding privacy. The only thing I didn’t find interesting is the fact that they don’t have Mastodon accounts or a community on Lemmy, and although they have subreddits for IceDrive and IceVPN, they aren’t mentioned on the company’s website (that is, if they are actually official).
Knowing this information, will you give them a chance? If you’ve ever used any of their products, what did you think?
Links for those who want to know more about the company:
Company page: https://ice.gi/
IceDrive privacy policy: https://icedrive.net/legal/privacy-policy
IceVPN privacy policy: https://icevpn.com/legal/privacy-policy
Reading the community will tell you everything.
Until an independent third party audit of their vpn services is available I’ll not even consider using it. My drive is in my basement.
I get your point about the VPN, but as for the Drive: not everyone has the know-how, resources, or patience to do things themselves.
External hard drives are dead simple. Just plug in a cable, open a file manager, copy files.
This carries a significant amount of risk; if you lose access to your device containing the files, you lose access to them entirely
Yeah, sorry, I read your “will you give them a chance” as asking for my personal thoughts on the matter. That not everyone has the know-how doesn’t stop me from self-hosting. ;-)
My advice when it comes to external services - never trust them to keep your data safe. If the data is important to you keep your own backups.
An example is when TietoEvry, one of the largest IT service providers in the Nordics, lost up to 20 years of archived data for their customers.
They’re proprietary. It doesn’t seem to be a good idea right now.
Someone needs to audit their stuff so we can get a good idea of what they’re like, and then see how they react.
The three companies I mentioned are also proprietary, but I get your point. I just don’t understand why I’m getting so many downvotes; my post was a “suggestion” for an extra tool to help us achieve our digital sovereignty. It’s not good to tie ourselves down to such a limited number of companies, especially since the more tools we have, the better. At least that’s my point of view.
Proton’s proven to be open-source on a good chunk of their applications (server-side, not so much), Mullvad is proven to be FOSS as well from what I understand, and Tuta’s open-sourcing their stuff too.