The founder of secure file storage service SpiderOak says the company has seen both traffic to its site and signups increase by 50 per cent since Edward Snowden's revelations about US government surveillance in June 2013.



Ethan Oberman, CEO and founder of SpiderOak, said the service had enjoyed "sustained and continued growth" in the past year, as consumer and business awareness of privacy and security has increased.



"Privacy is a right, not a privilege," Oberman told the Guardian, saying that it is important that private services are usable for the mainstream, with privacy more of a hidden benefit. "The hard part is letting privacy disappear into the background so that the user doesn't feel – bridging those two things is very complicated."

SpiderOak, which has offices in San Francisco, Chicago and Kansas City, offers secure file storage that encrypts users' files before they are sent to the SpiderOak server. The files cannot be decrypted or accessed in plain text without a unique key, or long number string, which only the user has.

"Snowden has used a term we began using seven years ago, this concept of 'zero knowledge' – the idea that the server does not know what it is storing. Customers are paying you for the service and you, as the intermediary, cannot access that plan text data."

Oberman said that not every element of Spideroak is open sourced – made available for the security community to audit – but that that balance is difficult for a commercial company. "That's an additional element to trust with a certain segment of the community, but if the idea is to push security mainstream, many people don't care or have enough knowledge to understand an audit report.

Zero knowledge states an intention to structure a business in a certain way from the beginning he says; Spideroak has also developed an open source application framework called Crypton that can be used by any developer to build secure applications.

"Trust is a lot about the intention of the business," he said. "Zero knowledge states your intention from the beginning - it's very different strain in thinking about monetising a business; how are companies charging their userbase? Are they reselling their users' data on the advertising market?

"The question might be 'will you pay $1 month more for a chat application that actually is private?'"



Oberman said SpiderOak is often asked about the boundary between the right to personal privacy, and privacy that may protect illegal activity such as child abuse material.

"It's a very complicated issue and everybody in society believes these people need to be brought to justice," he said. "But at its core I do believe privacy is a right. We all need to feel comfortable with a document stored online or a conversation between friends – these things need to remain private, because if not it could represent a very scary place to live.



"History is littered with times when bad people have abused holes in legislation – the ability to surveil has been abused many, many times. If they were never abused we wouldn't be having this conversation."



Asked what the future should hold for Snowden, who told the Guardian on Thursday that if he ends up in US detention in Guantánamo Bay he can live with it, Oberman said he deserves a fair trial.

"Snowden has raised awareness of a critical issue we all need to be aware of, and once that's out of the bottle ... that's it. Whatever happens to him, this is not going to go away as a mainstream issue," he said.



"I'm not in a position to say how history will judge him. But I do think he should have a fair trial. He has the right to have his case heard, and both sides have a right to stand up and tell it. I hope he gets to stand up and tell it."