I use any online service with the assumption that the things I put up there could likely become public, no longer anonymous, or what have you. I don't think this is overly paranoid, given how difficult computer security is.
To me; it would make sense if Dropbox stored everything encrypted (as in, encrypted pre-transfer), and you needed the private key to decrypt stuff, unless you specifically state that it is to be public. It just makes sense from a liability statement. That said, you can do this anyway as recomended in this article.
(http://lifehacker.com/5813873/how-to-add-a-second-layer-of-e...)
It's unfortunate that simple public key encryption, which has been easily available for many years, is still seen as untenable and "super-paranoid." Any email client, or better yet Gmail, could easily implement it and make it virtually transparent to the user (when both ends of the email are using such a client, obviously).
I apologise if you have mistaken my meaning! I certainly hope we don't take wider scale encryption to be untenable, but it is very certainly untenable for a single person to use the web in a meaningful way with normal people while maintaining that every single email needs to be encrypted.
The security of my private mailserver is nearly the same as the security of my laptop. For security reasons I don't use a VPS for email, but a small server that sits in my basement: There are some security measures that will lead to an automatic shutdown in case someone tries to physically access the server and the whole harddisk is encrypted. (Yes - you can call me paranoid.)
Depends on the online-service. E.g., I trust tarsnap (client-side encryption, not under an open-source license but you can compile it yourself) with very sensitive data. I also trust Wuala (also client-side encryption) with semi-sensitive data, although it somewhat worries me that Wuala's source is not publicly available for reviews. I don't trust Dropbox due to the lack of encryption - that's why I don't really use it, even though I currently have a free account with 20 GB available.
To me; it would make sense if Dropbox stored everything encrypted (as in, encrypted pre-transfer), and you needed the private key to decrypt stuff, unless you specifically state that it is to be public. It just makes sense from a liability statement. That said, you can do this anyway as recomended in this article. (http://lifehacker.com/5813873/how-to-add-a-second-layer-of-e...)