Howbeit a late comer to the fray, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada recently joined the growing list of officials expressing concerns about the shift to cloud hosting. Their paper, titled “Privacy Issues related to Cloud Computing”, was an abbreviated rehash of readily available information from many other papers on the same subject.

The copyrighted paper (most documents issued by Canadian Government are), in my opinion, misses the mark. The paper's introduction gives a broad overview of cloud computing, providing some Pew Internet Survey statistics to suggest why there is a shift to the cloud. The paper then continues to provide us with all the reasons why we should be concerned in what appears to be a copy and paste manner from countless other papers issued by various governments on the same subject.

In short, there is a lot of "what if" speculating without any clear basis in fact or practicality. Things like unintended intrusion, inappropriate use of data, or any number of the other issues pointed out by the paper are possible, but they are also possible in the current model of co-located, managed, or shared hosting environments.

The average client wishing to host their latest web offerings, mostly concern themselves only with the likes of page load speeds, and website uptime. If Pew were to survey this same “crowd”, likely many respondants would express concern over intrusion and spying by the same powers that are issuing these papers.

Protection of personal data is a growing concern with the advancement of technology. Cloud computing does present unique consideration that go beyond the current model as the data uploaded will cross various jurisdictional boundaries. Individuals and businesses will need to consider the implications and especially the legal issues that may surround their particular circumstances. Users will need to ensure that they comply with the legal requirements of the data they collect and retain possession of.

The better approach for the privacy commissioner would be to remind, and ensure that the business practices and policies of companies are sound regardless of the location or type of technological platform used to power the site. This is NOT a technology issue, rather a business privacy and ethics issue.