Can California Lead on Privacy in Cloud Computing?

Grazed from DavisVanguard.org.  Author: Anupam Chander.

My parents grew up in a pen and paper world, where most of their writings and records were kept at home, in their offices, or with close confidantes. I grew up in a world of computers, but even my writings were mostly kept at home on hard drives and floppy disks (for today’s students, many of whom have never seen a floppy disk, a history of the floppy disk). My first writings were kept, astonishingly, on a cassette recorder, which stored what I typed on my TRS-80, a computer made by Radio Shack. That computer had a total memory of 16K, roughly 16,000 characters (not even words) of text.

My children are growing up in the cloud, where their writings and their records are being stored in remote computers. Because those computers are managed by Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, and their peers, their writings are far more secure than I ever managed when I stored my files on a floppy or a hard drive, both of which failed with remarkable regularity and maximally devastating timing…


But even if our kids never know the pain of losing a week’s work to faulty computing or an accidental deletion, they face a world where their writings are far more subject to government scrutiny than mine ever were. Not only are their writings subject to government searches, but also their whereabouts, through the tracking of smartphones. This is because while the Fourth Amendment clearly protects homes from searches and seizures without a warrant, it is not so clear that it protects writings and the records about us stored on a remote computer…

Read more from the source @ http://www.davisvanguard.org/2015/09/can-california-lead-on-privacy-in-cloud-computing/