Cloud Computing and Human Rights Research Paper

Cloud Computing and Human Rights - Research Paper Example Along the way, the paper touches on the legal regimes that regulate surveillance of cloud activities, and the basis of such laws in more fundamental laws relating to privacy rights. The paper also touches on the concerns that individuals and governments have with regard to the way cloud computing wrestles control of data from users, and how such control issues weigh on decisions by individuals and governments to move their activities over to the cloud (Ion et al. 2011; Solove 2007; Warren and Brandeis 1890; Necessary and Proportionate 2013; ACLU of Massachusetts 2013; Judge 2013; Brown 2013; Timberg 2013; Schneier 2013; Chen 2010; Davies 2013; Johnson 2013). II. Introduction This paper discusses the statement that cloud computing, in the new century, has the potentiality with regard to the creation of the largest violations of human rights. This statement pertains to cloud computing as a potential platform for the breaching of the privacy rights of individuals, and those corollary ri ghts that pertain to privacy rights, including the right to privacy of health information and other corollary rights. Cloud computing refers to the use of online storage and applications, including social media, platforms for sharing documents and images, and the way users are made to agree to user agreements that may compromise data privacy rights in favor of greater use of such personal information by service providers, among others. Such breaches of privacy rights and the issues tied to that extend to the way governments have come to have access to private citizen data as they are generated from their smartphones and other computing devices, including personal computers and tablets, and how such access is made without explicit consent and knowledge of citizens in various parts of the world. The violations of privacy rights can be gleaned from a cursory look at the literature to be pervasive and crosses social and national boundaries, and that in turn poses serious questions with regard to the overall desirability of cloud computing platforms when it comes to individuals who are wary of the intrusions into their private data by governments and private enterprises, and by the way such intrusions can result in the safety and overall integrity of the human person being compromised. This, in turn, poses questions with regard to the overall desirability of alternatives to cloud computing, such as the use of private, offline storage and applications, to circumvent surveillance by various governments and third parties and to secure the privacy rights of human beings around the world.