Concerns with mega.io

SANAULLAH

**Hello,

For the past year or so, I've used the MEGA cloud service, and I'm not inclined to renew my subscription.
I have shifted my opinion for a variety of reasons. How much information are they most keen to collect? Let's start there.

They ask for your name when you join up for their services, which is acceptable but I don't really enjoy it as a cloud-only customer.
However, suppose they do this for their messaging feature. Two years ago, they added "calling" and "messaging" capabilities alongside their cloud services. Both functions use the same data architecture and undoubtedly interact with one another. Increasing legal and illegal vulnerabilities, in my opinion, is a result of this.
They stray from the services that their customers were paying for, which means that a small portion of our payments are made inadvertently to cover the costs of their "messaging" and "calling" capabilities. As a result, they have improved their referral program. A portion is given to anyone who invites their "Contacts." after which you can safely talk with your friends.

Additionally, a date of birth data need is optional. to what end? I'm not sure, at all. But based on my investigation, they reportedly collect a lot of metadata from customers who have chosen to use their cloud-only services.

For my part, I prefer to support businesses that don't easily stray from their objective in order to increase money. In my opinion, those who focus only on a single objective are more dependable, sincere, and secure.

I'm looking to use Filen for my cloud needs.**

Fox

SANAULLAH Hello and thank you for your message.
Certainly with the passage of time MEGA seems to be losing some values of privacy and security that once defended, especially since Kim Dotcom left the company after allegedly a Chinese tycoon became the largest shareholder of the company, besides that, also allegedly, many of MEGA's investors are (I insist, allegedly, not yet known any explicit data about it) Chinese tycoons, with more or less influence of the Chinese government.
In my opinion, and I insist, it is my personal opinion, I would not rule out MEGA as an alternative for privacy because even today it is a big leap in security and privacy compared to Drive, Dropbox and the like. Mind you, you have to take it with tweezers and you will have to be very close to both the company and its service to be aware of when it "goes over the edge", so to speak.
My recommendations: If you don't feel safe with MEGA, don't worry, try the other alternatives we recommend at PrivacyTools and choose the one that suits you best. I personally prefer to store my data physically, on a portable hard drive or in a home cloud, but I'm not closed to using online services to store data. I use Skiff Drive, and in the future I plan to pay for a Proton Unlimited account.
I hope I have answered any questions or added something new with my post. I haven't tried Filen, so please let us (or me) know how the service is.
Best regards.

Links about MEGA:
https://tosdr.org/en/service/306
https://www.cloudwards.net/review/mega/

SANAULLAH

Fox Thank you for providing such specific details.
What I liked about Filen was its simple and redesigned user interface, Zero-Knowledge encryption, open-source nature, and emphasis on gathering as little data as possible.
Their Privacy Policy is comprised of six points of clear language and understanding. Furthermore, they have their own data infrastructure in Germany, which is compliant with GDPR regulations. In addition, after testing several gigabytes of data, there was no connection speed throttling in their free version.
In their GDPR information, I discovered the following: Username (email), lastActiveUnixTimestamp, lastIPAddress, userAgents, and the platforms used to sign-in.

I found this data in their Android app.

SANAULLAH

I'd like to add to this discussion.
One of the factors that compelled me to leave MEGA was my GDPR data, which can be found in their security tab and that included my country, IP, current email, other associated or changed emails, account attributes such as: first and last name with timestamps, and previously changed names that were edited with timestamps and device tokens, as well as contacts, invites, shares, chats, file related IPs, all sessions, and payments details that were used.

These details are not encrypted in order to improve the performance of their services!

At the end it was mentioned: "This Archive contains your Personal Data stored by Mega with the exception of some high-volume file-related meta-data that are accessible via your account login on any of our official client applications. e.g. file upload timestamps and chat message timestamps".