A recent White Paper titled “A Global reality: Governmental Access to Data in the Cloud” examines governmental authority to access data in the cloud in Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States.
The paper was written by Christopher Wolf and Winston Maxwell from (US based) international law firm Hogen Lovells and released at the Openforum Academy in Brussels.
Some of the key findings and conclusions (according to Hogen Lovells) of the paper are:
- It is incorrect to assume that the US government’s access to date in the Cloud is greater than that of other advanced economies
- The USA Patriot Act provisions are narrower than thought
- Every jurisdiction examined requires Cloud service provider to disclose customer data
- In some jurisdictions data stored in the Cloud may be disclosed to governmental authorities voluntarily without legal process
- Businesses/Cloud users are misleading themselves if they believe that restricting Cloud services providers to one jurisdiction better insulates data from governmental access
Reference: Hogan Lovells Chronicle of Data Protection blog
Posted in: Observation
RealLifeISM 
Posted on May 31, 2012 by Heiko Herrmann
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