Wells Fargo is launching a cyber alternative to traditional safety deposit boxes called vSafe. Athough you can’t store physical items there (obviously), the bank believes there’s a market of people who want an online place to store digital copies of birth certificates, passports, wills, and other important documents.

In principle, this is a great concept. But as a practical matter, there’s the security concerns. From hackers to the occasional bank employee with sticky fingers, there’s a risk that what you store online, encrypted or not, will find its way into the hands of someone who wants to steal your identity or worse. Just take a look at the number of stories in recent years about credit card numbers being stolen from supposedly secure sites.

Please note that I’m not picking on Wells Fargo — just highly skeptical that the convenience factor of digital storage will outweigh the security risks. Hopefully, Wells Fargo will live up to its reputation and protect critical data with vSafe.

I’ll take a wait-and-see approach. If you try vSafe, let me know your experience.

Hat tip to the Associated Press.

About the Author

With an advanced international law degree from Georgetown University and more than 14 years of real world legal experience, Attorney Mike Young shows entrepreneurs how to protect and grow their businesses online. He's the author of Internet Marketing Legal Secrets Revealed. Not just a lawyer who focuses exclusively on Internet and marketing law, Mike’s been working with computers for more than 27 years (his first computer was an Atari 400 with 8 KiB RAM) and started representing Internet businesses back in 1996.