Legal Commentary

Mozy Understands How to Write Warnings

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

Online backup provider Mozy.com offers 2GB of free storage to the home user.

You can use their encryption key — which means it’s recoverable: they have a backdoor if you loose it, or if someone else turns up with a subpoena — or you can grow your own.

I chose the latter. Which produced this great warning pop-up:

I understand that if I ever lose this key, that neither I nor MozyHome will be able to decrypt my data and I will be hosed.

I clicked “yes”.

(Only later did I find out that Mozy will only backup files resident on a fixed disk. I wanted to back up my USB drive. Oh well. At least I got a laugh.)

Full post as published by Discourse.net on February 19, 2008 (boomark / email).