Europe Aims to Regulate the Cloud

Grazed from The New York Times. Author: Danny Hakim.

The words “cloud computing” never appeared in a 119-page digital privacy regulation introduced in Europe last year. They do now. Even before revelations this summer by Edward J. Snowden on the extent of spying by the National Security Agency on electronic communications, the European Parliament busied itself attaching amendments to its data privacy regulation. Several would change the rules of cloud computing, the technology that enables the sharing of software and files among computers on the Internet.

And since the news broke of widespread monitoring by the United States spy agency, cloud computing has become one of the regulatory flash points in Brussels as a debate ensued over how to protect data from snooping American eyes…

Cloud technology has become a routine part of digital life, whether it is used for Web-based services to send e-mail or store photographs or to warehouse troves of business or government records. It has enabled the convenient sharing of data among mobile devices and enhanced the ability of people to collaborate and share documents. It has also cut the cost of doing business…

Read more from the source @ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/business/international/europe-aims-to-regulate-the-cloud.html?_r=0