The Law, Privacy and Cloud Computing

The rapid advancement of Cloud Computing has the government scrambling to evolve privacy protection laws to keep them relevant. If the laws do not keep pace with technology, the constitution protections are seriously jeopardized. Unfortunately the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) was written more twenty years ago and pre-dates the internet. Many legal experts are advocating serious reform of the ECPA to provide clear guidelines to service providers about all the data that is in their cloud infrastructure.

The popularity of cloud computing resources being used by businesses and consumers for storing photos, e-mail, private data, and medical records is growing as it provides a low cost alternative. The security of this information may be jeopardized as a subpoena for e-mail can be served to a service provider and the owner of the e-mail may never be notified. As a result the government and attorneys are utilizing the vast amount of data and information stored on the cloud for purposes of their lawsuits and investigations. A single subpoena can provide the potential to gather information from millions of users. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution affords protection against unreasonable search and seizure for houses and papers. As technology has changed how information is shared and stored, it is time to extend the protections afford under the Constitution to provide appropriate level of protection to digital information.