Known for being one of China’s largest internet companies, Tencent has announced that it are preparing to launch an international version of its cloud storage product next year - by offering a whopping 10TB of free cloud storage to its international users, Pando Daily Reports. (via The Next Web)
Why is this penguin winking at you?
The vice president of Tencent’s social network group, Peter Zheng, announced that the complimentary storage will be available to US internet users early in 2014. Tencent is also launching an English version of a new Instagram-like image app, Story Camera, within the next two to three weeks - this is an app already popular in China.
The 10TB free storage currently offered to their users in China is 10 times more than the already-astonishing 1TB being offered by rival Chinese tech giants Baidu and Qihoo 360. This also puts the 7GB available on Microsoft’s SkyDrive, 15GB giveaway for Google Drive and basic 5GB of DropBox storage offerings to shame.
Please note, users will not get the whole 10TB capacity in one go as Tencent tops up your storage as you occupy it. New users receive 1TB of free cloud storage space initially and as the amount of space they use increases the storage space will balloon closer to its maximum of 10TB.
Privacy concerns?
To those users who have worries about the too-good-to-be-true 10TB offer and resulting trust issues from using a Chinese service for data storage, Zheng stated that Tencent’s international user data will be stored in servers located in the US and Southeast Asia. This means that Tencent may be able to protect their user’s data from the interfering nature of the Chinese government and 'Great firewall of China' jiggery-pokery. To win over the trust of international users Tencent will have to work hard to prove the security and privacy of their data storage or just hide their spying activity better than the Americans.
