Web Worker Daily – Who Protects Your Cloud Data?:
Yet in a world of imperfect hardware and software, as well as regulatory and legal issues, choosing one company for storage is still ultimately a gamble. It may be unthinkable that an EMC or Amazon or Google could fail, but it’s not impossible. No matter how carefully you choose, entrusting your data to a single online storage vendor is the equivalent to storing it on a single hard drive: it introduces a single point of failure into the system.
The cloud consists of data and services that live on someone else's servers. Although the term itself is new(ish), the basic idea is embodied by traditional legal research services like LexisNexis and Westlaw -- data lives on someone else's servers, not your own. Thus, someone else controls the data, not you. And someone else can delete or modify the data, and you'd never know...
One key reason to study history? To learn from the past: (1) take small steps, (2) favor reversibility, (3) plan on surprises, and (4) plan on human inventiveness.
In a Note called Defogging the Cloud: Applying Fourth Amendment Principles to Evolving Privacy Expectations in Cloud Computing, David A. Couillard explores the potential applicability of the Fourth Amendment to data stored in offsite servers: spreadsheets in Google Docs, accounting data hosted on FreshBooks, and pretty much everything synced through DropBox, just to name three example services.
The case of the disappearing case law
I'm currently a graduate student of the history of law and technology at the University of California, San Diego. I also provide law and technology consulting services.
Additionally, I'm a non-practicing lawyer and former developer/sysadmin at a biotech non-profit. For more about me and my work, see krisnelson.org or my Google Profile. Post title: Who Protects Your Cloud Data?
Authored by: Kristopher Nelson
Date posted: Jan 13, 2008
Categorized as: business • technology
Tagged with: Amazon • cloud computing • Google • software • web
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