Straight to the point.
TL;DR.This is a statement by Kim Dotcom, creator of Mega.
“I am no longer involved in Mega. Neither in the management nor in the shareholding. The company has suffered a hostile takeover bid from a Chinese investor who is wanted in China for fraud. He used a series of intermediaries and companies to accumulate more and more Mega shares. His shares have recently been seized by the New Zealand government. This means that the New Zealand Government is in control. As a result of this and a number of other confidential matters I no longer trust Mega . I don’t think your data is safe at Mega.”
MEGA. You know this name, don’t you?
MEGA is the name given to one of the most known international cloud storage platforms, which is also the successor of the controversial Megaupload. Why “controversial”? Because Megaupload was closed down in 2012 by the FBI as it was considered illegal and it violated copyright.
Its creator, Kim Dotcom, is not exempt from controversy either. The German hacker has lived his life amidst scandals, both in his personal and professional life, and has been convicted on several occasions for illegal activities. His life has been spent between various countries of the world in order to escape from the police and to find more “favourable” laws. But this crazy life has not stopped him from creating some companies along the way.
Among them is MEGA (mega.zn), the current cloud storage platform that was created just one year after Megaupload was closed. As they say on their website, it was created by the same people, including Dotcom, but they want to disassociate themselves completely from him by saying that it is no longer part of the company. Perhaps because they know that their platform needs a facelift, right?
But let’s get down to business. MEGA and how it works now.
Mega is a cloud storage platform that allows users to save their files online and to have access to them whenever they want. In their web site they are not labelled as a decentralized platform but they do indicate that the files are encrypted, divided and sent to different nodes so I consider it to be a decentralized cloud.
At first sight it seems the perfect service. And on top of that, they attract users with an offer that cannot be refused: 50GB of free storage.
But not all that glitters is gold and in their offer there is an asterisk that changes things a lot.
They do not really offer you 50GB but 15GB since they only give you 15GB for life while the rest (35GB) expires after 30 days. So why do they mislead users? Why aren’t they clearer? They seem to be launching offers in disguise to try and trick customers. Are they back to their old days?
When a user exceeds these 15GB Mega “hijack” their account. This means that they don’t let users access their own account. Mega does not let the owners of the information access it. This is very serious.😐 Some users would like to delete some documents in order to have more space, but Mega does not even let them do that. I don’t know about you, but this seems to me to be something that would be more like the old Megaupload.
But the obstacles continue. In the free version there is a download limit and the files have a maximum weight. Not to mention the time users have to wait for the download to finish. I understand that if a company offers a free plan it must have certain limitations in order to favour and offer advantages to paid users. But this is not a reason to make the user experience with a free plan uncomfortable.
In terms of price it is good, in fact it is the same price as Internxt which is a much safer European alternative.
And maybe now you’re wondering why I say that Internxt is safer if both are Decentralized Cloud Storage (although MEGA doesn’t make it clear on their website). Well, it’s very simple. Internxt is open source while Mega is not. This means Mega does the same as Whatsapp. They say that messages in their platforms are end-to-end encrypted but we don’t have any option apart from trusting the company blindly because we have no way of checking that they are actually complying with it. And to trust blindly means, in most cases, that you will be tricked, and if we consider MEGA´s background it is more than likely that they are tricking us.
The truth is that a company is not just the product or the service it offers. It is also the people behind it and the values these people hold and share. If all the people who were behind Megaupload are still behind today’s MEGA Nz, who can assure us that our information is safe? No one. And I do not feel secure using it.
Conclusion: I don’t trust MEGA Nz at all. I see many things that I don’t like, among them so many broken promises and the lack of an open source that doesn’t allow us to check if they actually carry out everything they promise.
