Yesterday I received a frantic phone call from a friend. He is traveling overseas and had a run-in with the police in which they were basically trying to extort money from him for no reason–no reason other than it’s an easy way for them to make money. It’s a long and unrelated story so I won’t go into exactly what he did, but it was the equivalent of jaywalking. The police asked for his passport which he had left in the room. They then insisted on taking him to his room to get his passport, but my friend was smart enough to know that wouldn’t be a good idea and he was lucky enough to have someone else with him so he had them go to his room to get his passport while he went with the officers to the police station.
While at the police station they requested information about where he was staying and he wisely gave them a wrong address. I’m not saying it’s a good idea to lie to police, but it was clear that these officers were corrupt and it is a good idea to make sure corrupt police have as little information about you as possible.
The officers demanded over $3,000 and threatened that if he didn’t pay they’d put him in jail and then get him banned from the country upon his release. He knew he had done something wrong by “jaywalking” but it was fairly innocent and he was ok paying a small fine, but couldn’t believe they were making such a big deal out of all of this.
Long story short, he got them to agree upon $500 by insisting that’s all he had in his bank account, and a plain clothed officer escorted him to the closest ATM so he could withdraw the funds. At this point in this story some of you are probably arguing that you wouldn’t have paid even $500 as you’d just let them take you to court as the penalty for “jaywalking” would have been probably $10 at most. Well, he knew that if he refused to pay anything, the charge when he got to court would have certainly been much more than just jaywalking as these corrupt cops would have trumped up some good charges as revenge for his refusal to cooperate.
He was upset about being extorted for $500, but he realized this could have been much worse even without them trumping up charges. These corrupt cops would have loved to have had a better charge for my friend, and what if they had gone back to his room to recover his passport? No problem? Well, he knew he had some stuff on his computer hard-drive that could cause him problems. He was somewhat of a ladies’ man and he’d sometimes use the built-in webcam on his computer to capture footage of his escapades with other women. Nothing much wrong with that as we’ve all done this at some point and this was for his own personal and private viewing and he’d never shown the footage to anyone else. But if the police had went into his room and saw his computer, they certainly would have searched it and uncovered this footage. His charge would have then escalated to illegal possession of pornography as in the country he was in, it was illegal to possess pornography even though it was readily available for purchase everywhere–just don’t get caught with it I guess!
However, even a possession of pornography charge wouldn’t have been worthy of $3,000, but one of the women he had personal footage of was a prominent attorney and yet another was a police officer. Imagine the serious ass-whooping he would have received for the footage of the officer, or the blackmailing that would have been involved with the attorney!
Simply put, it’s not a good idea to simply store any footage on your computer which you don’t want to windup in the hands of others. I’ve heard many first-hand accounts of people who had their computer at the repair shop and private pictures obtained, computers searched countless times when traveling through airports, and even people mistakenly leaving their networks unsecured and others browsing their computers remotely and finding personal pictures they certainly wouldn’t want made public–the things I’ve seen!
The point is, don’t take the chance especially when it involves other people’s lives. If you want to risk it with your own, that’s ok, but if you have anything which involves someone else which they’d be embarrassed if it was made public, you need to make sure it’s secure. If you aren’t sure how to secure it, then get rid of it! I’ll have to do another article on securely deleting digital files as simply hitting the delete button does “not” delete it as you’d assume since the button is called DELETE after all. That’s an article for another day though, but for now, let me cover one way to store videos securely.
Ok, back to my friend. He was thinking he’d be best just to delete these files. Yes, this current situation with the police was over, but this entire thing got him thinking…what about the next time or some other situation in which someone is able to get ahold of his files? I recommended a very simple, free, and readily available off-site storage solution–YouTube.
Many of you will be surprised to hear me recommend YouTube as most people think of it as only a place for public videos, but you can store private videos there as well. Here is how:
Log into YouTube and click the Upload.
Drag and drop your video file or click the “Upload Video” button to select the file from your hard-drive.
By default, your video will be listed as Public which is exactly what you DON’T want, so it’s very important at this step to CHANGE this setting to PRIVATE and to do so quickly BEFORE the video finishes uploading and encoding as it’ll be made available immediately after it’s uploaded and encoded unless you change this setting immediately.
Once it’s saved and encoded, you’ll receive the following.
At this point you are done. Once it’s done encoding, you should make sure to check that it’s Private by right clicking and copying the URL of your video to memory, Signing Out, and then pasting the URL in the address bar to see if it loads.
Only you will be able to view this file. If you want to allow others to view it, you will need to add their email address, and they will also have to log into their YouTube accounts before they will be able to view the video. If they aren’t logged in, and not added by you to view the video, they won’t be able to view it. To add them, simply goto the Videos link to list all your uploaded videos.
Click the Edit button.
In the Sharing Options section you will find a place where you can add the email addresses of people you’d like to add to view the file. Only those people will be able to view it. Of course, you don’t have to add anyone.
You can access the video anytime by logging into YouTube, from any computer, anywhere in the world. You can also download the video from YouTube at any time and I’ll explain how to do that in another article.
Of course, it goes without saying that you need to keep your password safe and make sure you are using a strong password. YouTube is owned by Google which has one of the safest and most secure systems out there. That’s yet another article for me to explain why though. But for now you have the video stored safely online in a place which is much more secure than being on your computer unencrypted. You can access your video from anywhere as long as you have an Internet connection, and you can download the file to restore it back to your hard-drive if you decide.
It should be noted that YouTube has made clear that it is not a backup service and that you should keep a backup of anything you value. This is just to protect YouTube should something happen and they erase your data. It’s unlikely to happen, and certainly less likely to happen in their hands than yours. Yet, in another article I will be discussing how to keep other backups of your important data. YouTube could be considered as one viable backup solution, and we’ll later discuss options for another solution so that your data is safely at two different locations which is what you want.