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Who wants 10TB of FREE cloud storage? Hands down if China is a deal breaker?

Hands up if you're just gonna use it for, er, cat videos?

Chinese web giant Tencent has vowed to offer 10TB cloud storage accounts to international users free of charge.

The company hopes to launch the data-archiving service worldwide in 2014 using the English language. It opened its doors in China in August, and can be accessed from desktop computers as well as mobile devices using iOS and Android apps.

For those of you worried about China's online censorship and surveillance, Pando Daily reports that Tencent will hosting the servers for its international storage service in facilities outside of the Asian nation, perhaps possibly reducing the access state officials would have to the company's stored data - and placing the data closer to users, from a connectivity point of view.

Many cynics will be quick to note that US cloud providers haven't been doing users many favors when it comes to privacy and protection from government snooping. Customers are enraged that the NSA and GCHQ, at least, have been able to worm their ways into popular providers including Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Those US web titans have appealed to the authorities for permission to warn users when their information has been slurped by intelligence services, but thus far the pleas have been met with flat-out refusals from the US government. ®

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