I agree that "cloud storage" paradigms are a sea change from the status quo of the old days. My father has a file cabinet at home and keys on his keychain, wherein he stores all his important paperwork. There is no way anyone's getting in there except by entering his home and physically intruding on those drawers. Dad would at least notice the search and seizure, right?

What is just as crazy as cloud storage, is how you "go paperless" with all your service providers. Such as health care, utility bills, banks, etc. They don't print a paper statement and send it to your snail mail box anymore. They produce a PDF and store it in their cloud storage and then you need to go get it when you want/need it.

The typical consumer may never go get their paperwork from the provider's cloud. It is as if they said "Hey this document's in our warehouse! You need to drive across town, prove your identity, and look at it while you're here! ...You may not be permitted to take it with you, either!"

So I've been rather diligent and proactive about going to get my "paperless documents" from the various providers, and storing them in my own cloud storage, because, well, at least it's somewhere I can access it. I care a lot more about paying my medical bills, and accounting for my annual taxes, than someone noticing that I harbor anti-jew sentiment. I mean, I think they already figured that part out.

> But One-drive is essentially a mass-surveillance tool.

There are plenty of people that post clear positions on multiple social networks. I personally doubt that One-drive files will provide much more information for most of the people compared to what's already out there (including mobile phone location, credit card transactions, streaming services logs, etc.).

What I think the danger is for individual abuse. Someone "in power" wants one guy to have issues, they could check his One-drive for something.

Best is to make people aware of how it works and let them figure it out. There are so many options (local only, encrypted cloud storage, etc.) I doubt there is an ideal solution for everything.

> pointless

Full-disk encryption is the opposite of pointless, my dude! The notebook-thief cannot access my data! That is the entire point!

No, I cannot recover the data from an HDD or SSD that I don't possess. But neither can the thief. The thief cannot access the keys in my cloud. Isn't that the point?

If a thief steals a notebook that isn't encrypted at all, then they can go into the storage, even forensically, and extract all my data! Nobody needs a "key" or credentials to do that! That was the status quo for decades in personal computing--and even enterprise computing. I've had "friends" give me "decommissioned" computers that still had data on their HDD from some corporation. And it would've been readable if I had tried.

The thief may have stolen a valuable piece of kit, but now all she has is hardware. Not my data. Not to mention, if your key was in a cloud backup, isn't most of your important data in the cloud, as well? Hopefully the only thing you lost with your device are the OS system files, and your documents are safely synced??