Say hello to Safeplug, Pogoplug's $49 Tor-in-a-box for anonymous surfing
You may know Pogoplug as the maker of little “personal cloud” devices for streaming media from your home to your smartphone, or, if you're more up to speed with what the company's been doing, you may be aware of its Dropbox-battling cloud storage services.
Context & Ripple Effects
Pogoplug began life as Cloud Engines, which raised $15M in late 2010 to turn idle hard drives into private cloud servers, then spent the years since fighting Dropbox in hosted storage while its bigger rival refreshed its iOS apps and reportedly shopped a large funding round. Safeplug is a third act: rather than another storage plan, the company is selling a $49 appliance that runs Tor, betting anonymity hardware can sell alongside — not instead of — its cloud subscriptions.
Why the story travelled: Dropbox petitioned in September 2013 for permission to publish details of US government data requests against it, underscoring that hosted storage runs on trust in the provider. A box that makes household browsing hard to attribute answers that trust problem structurally, which helps explain why eight outlets from MIT Technology Review to Motherboard picked up the announcement the same day.
First-order effects
- Pogoplug extends its product line from recycled-hard-drive private clouds into anonymity appliances, charging $49 for a device that spares non-technical buyers from installing and configuring Tor themselves.
- Same-day pickups by Engadget, MIT Technology Review, VentureBeat, Motherboard and others put consumer privacy hardware on mainstream review desks rather than confining it to security blogs.
Second-order effects
- Hosted-storage rivals such as Dropbox — already fighting for the right to disclose government data requests — face customers who would sooner make their traffic unattributable than audit a provider's transparency promises.
- A $49 sticker sets an early reference price for plug-in privacy, pressuring router and NAS makers to treat anonymization as a bundled feature rather than an enthusiast add-on.
Third-order effects
- If anonymity becomes an appliance category, consumer-scale traffic hits the volunteer-run Tor network in volumes desktop clients alone never produced, straining its relay and exit-node economics.
- Trust migrates from provider transparency reports toward user-owned hardware — a structural pull away from the hosted-services model both Pogoplug and Dropbox were built on.
The trend: Consumer anonymity is shifting from expert-configured software to cheap plug-in appliances, as privacy detaches from hosted cloud services and moves to the home network edge.