Data Privacy Week: Who owns your data?

Here at Nextcloud we love reasons to celebrate data privacy, to continue exploring and improving our privacy goals. Respecting privacy is a deep aspect of our company and community culture, our shared mission, and a concept we interact with daily. With Data Privacy Week in full swing, we’re excited to be part of the conversation — and part of the solution — in regaining and maintaining privacy of your personal and corporate data.

We encourage you this week to be introspective, to re-evaluate your current privacy landscape, and to explore steps you can take to regain aspects of your data privacy. And in case you’re already a privacy advocate, we encourage you to help guide others to a more private digital lifestyle!

Who owns your…

If you’ve met us at conferences and corporate events around the world, you may have seen our swag with memorable nudging queries:

We encourage you to ask yourself regularly: Where is your contact book stored, and who has access to that data? What about your calendar, or your email? Medical data? Your location?

And with everyday technology’s every-evolving pace, we can also begin to ask: Who owns your AI prompts? Your intellectual property and corporate secrets? What of your home surveillance videos? Your Bitcoin wallet?

Recommended everywhere

We’re proud that together with our open source community we’ve built the industry’s leading privacy-respecting online collaboration platform as recommended everywhere. PrivacyTools.io highlights Nextcloud in their list of “Top 10 Privacy Tools” and “Best Encrypted Cloud Storage in 2024“. PrivacyGuides.org features Nextcloud at the top of many categories from Productivity Tools and Collaboration Platforms, to File Sync.

Think Dropbox, Google Drive, or iCloud, except that you have complete control over where and how your files are stored.

ProPrivacy’s review of Nextcloud

Read review

Most trustworthy cloud storage… With Nextcloud, you, of course, decide where to keep your data.

ZDNET’s Best Cloud Services of 2024

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Nextcloud’s many privacy solutions

Nextcloud Hub, our collection of tools all under one unified platform, offers many solutions to help you secure your private data.

• Nextcloud Photos — backup, store, and enjoy your photos, privately.
• Nextcloud Notes — secure, mobile note-taking in your back pocket.
• Passwords Managers for Nextcloud — keep your accounts safe with better password strategies.
• Nextcloud Talk — private chat and video conversations for family, friends, and the office.

Local, private Artificial Intelligence

Several types of AI integrations are also available throughout Nextcloud Hub, from completely self-hosted options to integrations with external services. For a fully private AI experience, all self-hosted AI features in Nextcloud are built-in and run completely on your server, meaning none of your data leaves your premises and you’re in full control. We encourage you to read more about our Ethical AI Rating system, our dedication to transparency, and the various AI-assisted features available to you:

• AI in Nextcloud: what, why and how
• Meet the Nextcloud AI Assistant

Open Source: non-private code by design

When it comes to assuring privacy and security concepts are upheld in our software, we actually prefer to share our development in the open; transparent for all to see, inspect, share and participate in. Following open source development practices is deeply embedded in our identity, building trust in both the people and the code that goes into Nextcloud.

Curious? Explore what thousands of contributors create together on our GitHub!

Where to start?

While we firmly believe your data privacy is equally important every week of the year, we hope this Data Privacy Week encourages you to consider your current practices, and where you can take action to improve your data privacy. There’s plenty of opportunity to make improvements, collaborate with others, and to have fun along the way. We hope, too, that our excitement to make Nextcloud a central part of your data privacy toolkit helps make your journey that much more successful.

We all deserve privacy — after all, it has been declared a UN Human Right. Our goal is that together we can help make private-by-default the standard in all our technological endeavors.

Streamline your move to Nextcloud with our migration tools

We’ve created a number of migration tools to help you easily transition from platforms like Google, Microsoft, and more. With just a few clicks, you can move your documents, photos, chat logs, and calendar items into Nextcloud — a platform trusted by millions of users worldwide.

We currently offer migration tools for Google, Dropbox, OneDrive, and ownCloud to help you create a smooth transition, whether you’re a family or an enterprise.

We look forward to joining you on your data privacy journey! We also encourage you to discuss your data privacy with your family, friends, colleagues and those who care for your data.