Cloud Privacy : Normative Standards Needed to Foster Innovation

The principal thesis of this comment is that the free flow of personal information that respects privacy can fuel and cultivate innovation. The growth of cloud computing has led to a corresponding growth of user data stored on third party servers. While technology has advanced, privacy protection has been slow to evolve. U.S. privacy law has significant limitations in the protection of aggregated data — precisely the type of a substantial amount of cloud computing data. Privacy laws, regulations, and policies will have to be modernized and improved to instill trust in cloud computing, thus providing a foundation to support its growth and innovation. Portions of this comment are based on a paper presented at the 2010 Intelligent Information Privacy Management Symposium, Stanford University