Cloud computing: Legal standards up in the air

With the advent of Google Drive, we talk about cloud computing as if the bits and bytes of our lives are stored somewhere up in the air, but, really, the "clouds" are very terrestrial. What's more up in the air are the laws that govern who can access your stuff and how.

Originally a way for geeks to explain to the rest of us the notion of remote servers storing and serving up content, cloud computing can be defined several different ways, depending on whom you ask. In some ways, even email is a form of cloud computing. (It really lives on a server somewhere out there and is served up wherever we desire.) "The problem that cloud computing has, more generally, is that (the real world) assumes that rights are based geographically," Mark Radcliffe, senior partner at law firm DLA Piper, said in an interview with the newspaper. "That assumption is not realistic in the cloud." Why? Who knows where the servers really sit? They may be in the United States, governed by American laws. Or they may be across the pond in Europe, where there are rather stringent privacy rules. Regardless of where the company is based, the location of the servers determine in some large part who can legally gain access to the content on them and how.