Governments aren’t going to fix cloud’s privacy problem. It’s up to the industry—and us.
by Sean Gallagher - Oct 28 2014When the technology industry embraced “cloud computing” and made it part of our daily lives, we all made a Faustian bargain. They gave us a way to break free from the expense of owning all the hardware, making computing and storage capacity dirt cheap and available on demand. On the other side, we promised not to worry too much about the fine print.
“In the 2000s we had this wild cloud party,” said Peter Eckersley, technology projects director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That party ended—Edward Snowden crashed that party. And we’ve woken up with a massive privacy and security hangover that companies are now trying to shake.”
It’s not like this happened without warning. In 1999, former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy spoke in front of the US government and infamously said, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” But in the wake of the Snowden leaks, US companies that sell “cloud computing” services are now losing international customers in droves. At the same time, law enforcement and intelligence agencies are trying to keep what they have left, pushing back on attempts to make the cloud systems Americans use more secure from criminals and foreign governments because those authorities might get locked out too.
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