Most of us would not give our private, personal information to strangers and then trust them not to leak it. But that’s essentially what we do every time we store chat histories, email, documents, and pictures on the cloud. When you save a document to Google Drive, a photo album to iCloud, or an intimate conversation to Facebook Messenger, you are trusting that this information will not be breached or misused.
There are ways, however, to encrypt your data so that only you can access it, and zero-access encryption is one of these methods. Zero-access encryption is a way of protecting data at rest — that is, while the information is sitting in storage on the cloud. With this type of encryption, even if hackers were to breach the provider’s servers and steal your files, they would not be able to decrypt the data. Zero-access encryption ensures that only you, the data owner, have the technical ability to read your data.