CloudApp

CloudApp was designed for rapid file sharing with the world (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and excels with its simplicity. It is a joy to share files with your Twitter followers and friends; simply drag a file to the menubar icon and we provide you with a really short link.

When a business like CloudApp and the community around it grows, privacy becomes a top priority. We need to address a few issues that were brought to our attention:

By uploading a file to CloudApp you are uploading it to the internet without password protection. Anyone who visits the link of your upload can access the data you shared (that’s what it was made for and why you love it, right?). Even though there are no public records of your links and it is very unlikely that someone will guess the link to your upload, it is possible.

We strongly advise you to restrain from uploading confidential data such as credit card information, legal documents or super secret Delta Force mission plans. If you did not think twice before uploading files to CloudApp we recommend trashing the files in question through the web interface.

How can we solve this problem? By adding a feature called private uploads. As soon as we were notified by one of our users (Sunday, May 09th) about this privacy issue we started working on a solution.

CloudApp just works because it is simple. Adding complexity to the application is something we try to avoid as much as possible. We could ask for a password for every private upload and have you confirm it with several dialogue boxes but that doesn’t sound like fun. Instead we opted for a simpler solution. You can now create public and private links:

Public

Public links (http://cl.ly/137X) have short URLs that are great for sharing with friends on Twitter.

Private

Private links (http://cl.ly/0b95b0851cc5a723c2cc) have a 20 digit randomly generated code (think of it as a password to access your upload).

Because we take privacy serious, by default from now on all uploads will be private (long URLs). If you wish to change this setting simply visit the Settings tab in the web app. Regardless of your default setting you can toggle the privacy status of each upload individually.

Even with this added security measure please don’t upload information containing highly sensitive information to CloudApp. While we can keep your data safe, we do not provide the necessary security to store information like credit card numbers or missile guidance codes.

Does this mean you shouldn’t upload artwork, music or files no one is supposed to see? Absolutely not, those files are safe as long as you flag them as private.