Is this real life?
Free cloud storage sounds like the things dreams are made of; from videos and pictures, to documents and music, I burn through storage space like nobody’s business and I know many other people operate the same way. Sure, I could stop being lazy and actually use the external hard drive sitting on my desk, but there is something extra convenient about cloud storage: I can access it from anywhere, any time. If I want to send a picture or file to someone, I can log in and quickly send without too much hassle.
The downside to cloud storage? It can get expensive if you need loads of space. At least this was true until Hive.
Hive is offering free, unlimited cloud storage to users. Hive is the first cloud service in the world to offer this for free. You can upload all your docs, infinite photos, massive music collections, and huge video libraries with ease and without fear of going over your allocated space limit. You can upload from your devices, or paste in a web link and Hive will grab the file for you. Sounds pretty dreamy, so what’s the catch?
What’s the catch!?
Nothing really. Okay, maybe a little catch. Hive is ad supported, so if you want to enjoy all that unlimited space, you may have to sit through several advertisements before you can enjoy all your files. In my opinion, that’s a pretty small catch for unlimited space. If you want to ditch the ads, you can with a premium account. The premium account is also the only way to can watch videos in HD. The price for premium depends on how many friends you have, which is the first drawback I find to Hive.
Hive gives you a discount based on how many friends you have, which of course means, they are keeping track of how many friends you have. Also, when I clicked the link to view the “privacy terms” to see how your data is used and stored, they did not appear.
The site also states they are relaunching with a new app on March 16th,, so this may explain the missing information. However, their privacy policy needs to be readily available before I, personally, would post my documents and other sensitive information. At the very least, I want to know that my information is not going to be sold or shared with other parties. If the privacy policy is similar to Dropbox and Google’s Drive, however, this would be an amazing way to keep all the storage-hogging information, without keeping it on your device.
