Thursday, October 14, 2010 1:59 PM
Jennifer Kavur recently published an article on IT World Canada’s website stating “Don’t use the Patriot Act as an excuse.” Let me sum up the article:
You shouldn’t worry about it because Canada has their own anti-terrorism act that is close to the Patriot Act, so really Canadians are under similar scrutiny.
Data isn’t guaranteed to travel only in Canada and could cross over wires to the US, putting it under US laws (i.e. Patriot Act). So it could go there anyway.
Canadian and US authorities share information all the time, so we should be ok with storing our information in the US too.
BULLSHIT!
All of those are weak arguments against the underlying issue: we are a separate, sovereign country who’s personal data should not be accessible by agencies of other governments. If I register with a US based site, that’s my choice to make that data available. But if a government agency or a company that holds information of a highly personal nature (bank or medical records for instance), that better be stored within Canada or I should be notified and given the opportunity to decline the storage of my data.
We live in a connected world of websites, Twitter, and Facebook where we can forget that there are real borders and real laws that are still in effect. Cloud computing makes it easy to forget this. “It’s all stored in the cloud, in the nether, in this airy fairy place that data lives, spread out over geographies”. Unfortunately, there’s a reality of jurisdiction that can’t be denied.
I do agree with the articles point that Canada does need a cloud strategy to enable us to reap the technical benefits of cloud computing. But being concerned about personal privacy is not an excuse…in fact, it should be a mandatory consideration.