Cloud storage can be insecure and people should take steps to protect their personal data online, a cyber security researcher says.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment is helping fund a $12 million project, called Stratus, to increase the security of data storage.
Waikato University researcher Ryan Ko, who heads the project, told Nine to Noon his team was focusing on tools which let internet users retain more control over what they had uploaded.
"An example would be like a remote kill switch, for example," he said.
"You would see that you're the one holding the key and when you upload the data on to the cloud, since you are holding the key nobody else can open the lock and you can give access to certain people who are privileged or allowed to look at data to open it with your key."
Mr Ko said greater security was increasingly important as health providers and other government agencies started to rely on cloud storage to share information.