Hey .. you.. get off of my cloud!

It still remains a great Rolling Stones song, but it couldn’t be more relevant than today. Acording to ONS over 40% of UK adults currently use cloud storage to get more memory on their devices. By storing photo’s, film’s, TV programmes and documents to the cloud, it frees up your own devices’memory.

Lots of cloud storage providers like Onedrive, Google Drive and Apple icloud offer a certain amount of memory for free, in some cases up to 15GB, charging up to £40 a month for extra memory. However an investigation into whether some providers are being charged unfairly is to be launched by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). They have said that some providers may be breaching consumer laws by increasing prices after a customer takes out a contract with them or changing the amount of data that can be stored.

The CMA are focusing on other complaints too, such as contracts being automatically renewed at the end of the consumers contract period, what happens to the consumers data when they cancel a contract and are even looking into suspicions that customers’ data is lost or being deleted. Since the Consumer Rights Act came into force in October this year, the CMA are taking a serious approach to breaches of consumer protection laws and have said if they will take further action if any breaches have been made by cloud storage providers. The investigation will begin mid-January in the new year and we should expect a report in May.