Cloud Computing and Privacy Legislation

In South Africa, President Zuma recently signed a Privacy Protection Act into law. Various countries have similar laws in place.

Section 11 of said Act makes it a criminal offence to divulge/make known any personal details, contact information, etc., by any person to a third party. It seems a bit drastic but service providers, retailers, even banks have been selling contact details without consent.

This leaves one in a position where you may end up with a criminal record if you have been using cloud services to synchronize contacts, calendars, tasks, etc., via services such as Google and it gets leaked from there. The recent 145 million exposed accounts at eBay comes to mind.

In a criminal court, the state prosecutor may argue that the "reasonable man" should have foreseen such leaks, based upon the history of successful hacking attempts. It could be argued that the user should have refrained from using cloud services.


The sad thing is that, especially for Linux users, there currently is no local sync alternative, except for those who have the resources to run a server with something like ownCloud. Most users simply have no options as device manufacturers are adamant about pushing everything through the cloud.


I stand corrected on this, but I am almost 100% sure that a legal advisor from New Zealand or Australia voiced a similar concern. It is my hope that someone really develops a user-friendly (read: newbie) solution that can be easily installed and configured, at least for Android devices as this is used by the majority.

Let's take the argument one step further - I get tired of all these advertisements for people to pay for ID Theft insurance - the law should be in favour of the individual, with the organisation that holds such information, whether as a service or otherwise should be the ones taking out insurance against loss of ID - NOT THE USER!!

Swarfendor437 wrote:Let's take the argument one step further - I get tired of all these advertisements for people to pay for ID Theft insurance - the law should be in favour of the individual, with the organisation that holds such information, whether as a service or otherwise should be the ones taking out insurance against loss of ID - NOT THE USER!!

In South Africa, the Electronic Communications Act is doing just that!

Having been the victim of ID Theft twice now, I am paying much attention to this. Both instances were physical theft and not a cracker who had hacked into my fairly secure system. No, they used my corporate letterheads, altered it and stole a few million from very poor people. No software protects one against manually committed crime, but even being in possession of the flurry of 419 scam emails doing the rounds, is a criminal offence. One has to delete them immediately, which is a sensible thing to be doing anyway.

Very true - some underworld scumbags stole the brass plate off a business in Hull and told Companies House it was now registered in London!

Hi,

Ubuntu is/was a South African based company and good old Mark put in the "Shopping Lenses" so he (his company) could make money by selling info to Amazon and Co!. You can switch it off in System Settings > Personal > Security & Privacy.

I don't use Clouds as I save all my data to my own disks and have them stored in 2 locations in case of a drive crash!. you can always carry a USB stick around with you!.

DON'T DO THE CLOUD, YOU ARE LEAVING YOURSELF OPEN TO MISUSE/ABUSE/LACK OF SECURITY/THEFT/HACKING!!. (This is my opinion to which I told my eldest brother off recently for daring to use a cloud storage unit!)

Hi Wolfman

Thanks for the info and, yes, I prefer to drink from my own well instead of depending upon a cloud that could burst and drown me, or hit me with a lightning bolt, so to speak!

Cloud computing does not interest me one bit but what does concern me is the organisation I work for has started using the cloud - and if personal information on me is held in that cloud I intend to request its removal - this article explains it all:

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240 ... ity-issues