If you upload data to a service, you can’t count on it staying private. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
A report recently published by Politico about the automated transcription service Otter.ai serves as a great reminder of how difficult it can be to keep things truly private in the age of cloud-based services. It starts off with a nerve-wracking story — the journalist interviewed Mustafa Aksu, a Uyghur human rights activist who could be a target of surveillance from the Chinese government. But though they took pains to keep their communication confidential, they used Otter to record the call — and a day later, they received a message from Otter asking about the purpose of the conversation with Aksu.
Obviously, it was a concerning email. After receiving mixed messages from an Otter support agent about whether the survey was real or not,…
