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Just a thought
How about publishing a warrant canary on on the website

Company and Servers are under German / EU law. IANAL, but I believe we do not have such secret requests as they exists in the USA.

It’s interesting actually. When we were seeing an exodus of devs away from ownCloud Inc. without any explanation, my first thought was that there was pressure being put on ownCloud Inc by some government agency to give details on known users or something. The whole “we’re leaving, but don’t want to say why”, reminded me of Lavabit somewhat, even if the company wasn’t shut down.

With the difference that Lavabit themselves hosted sensitive user data, unlike ownCloud Inc.

Well, yes, that’s true, however if they know that specific persons of interest are using ownCloud version X (from ownCloud Inc’s server logs for the download section), then no doubt they’d have some pretty efficient ways of getting in, like any undisclosed exploits they’d manage to discover by browsing the code.

Yes, not everyone installs by downloading directly from the ownCloud website, but a pretty significant number of people do.

Also, while ownCloud’s userbase may be much, much smaller than Dropbox, Google Drive etc, I’d be prepared to bet that the userbase for ownCloud consists of a higher percentage of dissidents and other types of people they’re interested in than your average service.

@Bugsbane IMHO it is more a thing of decency and professional work ethic. I switched jobs during my career and never bragged about any of my employers simply because there is no reason for it. If you don’t like what you do, change it. And I guess that is what the devs did. Better rise and shine with what you do next than bashing oC. - Just my 2 cents and an uneducated guess :slight_smile:

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@Andy - I’m confused. Are we even talking about the same thing? Where am I bashing OC? I LOVE ownCloud! I was talking about governments using dubious legal techniques to try and force the company to supply information which could be sensitive to OC/NC’s users. I see OC/NC/their users as the potential victims here, not as evil perpetrators. I’m sure neither company would gladly give up user data, as it stands for the exact opposite of what both companies stand for. The trouble is, that sometimes, government agencies can put any organization between a rock and a hard place (eg, I’m sure Lavabit’s founder would have preferred to not have to choose between disclosing customers data and closing his company.)

@Bugsbane You didn’t! Sorry for the confusion. My point was just that I think everyone who left the company doesn’t talk to much about it except for the community influence factor. So what I wanted to say is that the amount if clarification and information might just be out of respect for the former colleagues for example. Hope I didn’t offend you in any way. Wasn’t meant are some kind of an attack.

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Nah, it’s cool. I was just confused. I’m also rather sleep deprived at the moment, which is likely contributing… :wink:

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