I’ve been invited to participate in a panel at Princeton’s “Computing in the Cloud” conference on January 14-15. The topic of my panel will be:
In cloud computing, a provider’s data center holds information that would more traditionally have been stored on the end user’s computer. How does this impact user privacy? To what extent do users “own” this data, and what obligations do the service providers have? What obligations should they have? Does moving the data to the provider’s data center improve security or endanger it?
This is an interesting and open-ended question, and one about which I don’t have a lot of settled opinions. I’ll be speaking alongside two law professors, so I’ll probably leave any legal analysis up to them and focus more on policy or technology issues. I’ve written about this in the context of Facebook over at Techdirt; those posts may make a good starting point for my contribution to the panel.
But I’m curious what TLF readers think about these questions. And in particular, what are the must-read articles or papers on the subject?
It looks like it’ll be a fascinating couple of days, so if you’re in the area, be sure to sign up so you get some free lunch.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.