Dare to Think

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Do the above words apply to your content on the cloud?  That is the question posed by cnet’s James Urquhart in his blog The Wisdom of the Clouds.

Urquhart points to a note he has read by Minnesota Law School student David A. Couillard, titled Defogging the Cloud: Applying the Fourth Amendment Principles to Evolving Privacy Expectations in Cloud Computing.  I have not read the document (though I intend to do so in the coming days) but found Urquhart’s summary helpful and found myself in agreement with the overall thesis: that digital assets be treated stored in a third-party site be treated as physical property and not as a transaction.

However, with digital property stored with host like Salesforce there is little by way of encryption which the owner of the content can deploy.  So if someone at the hosting facility stores illegal material within the content or the organization gets compromised and the perpetrators insert or hind their contraband within customers data; is the Fourth Amendment still valid?

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• Do You Have Any Legal Right To Privacy For Information Stored Online? (techdirt.com)