Hello, I had an idea to use Storj.io to backup my photos of my baby and ... well... I had to build an app to do it! At least in the way I envisioned wanting to use it.

How is it different?

Sanctuary encrypts your data before it leaves the phone directly to the Storj gateway. The only information we hold onto in our backend is the metadata about the file (e.g., lat/lng, file creation date, size, etc…).

Sanctuary never stores the user’s encryption key, called the “sanctuary key”. This feature is what sets it apart from others that might claim they take your data privacy seriously, but at the same time, are the holders of that actual data.

Your Data (company I founded for this) has sought to flip this around with Sanctuary – the user owns the key hence the user owns the data. In our Storj bucket, we have blobs of data we know some metadata about, but certainly cannot see the contents.

This presents a hazard to the user – lose your key and you lose everything. That hazard, however, is comforting to many who don’t want their data to fall into the hands of the wrong employees / users. After all, how many celebrity leaks has there been? Somewhere, the data was sitting at rest unencrypted for many incidents I would guess. For Your Data, it’s double encrypted (user’s key & our key with Storj) and in pieces around a network in various hard drives… so not easy to hack!

This has been a year in the making and a remarkable achievement for us. We are a 2 man team, myself on iOS / business & another on API/Android (who actually did the Ruby Storj.io bindings!). Any support, feedback or guidance is very appreciated as we continue our mission to have the PEOPLE own the data!

(For Android – our app is still in development and is expected early 2024)