to the US governmet or google because they are trustworthy and your info won't go into the wrong hands.
If you give it to somebody else...good luck with that.
This is the third in a series of posts that examine the principles governing the transfer of data across borders between the European Union and the United States, and the effect that the USA PATRIOT Act has on businesses, citizens and governments outside the United States. Although this is a U.S.-oriented site and I am a British citizen, the issues I surface here affect all readers, whether living and working inside or outside the United States.
British and European universities are risking their students’ security by outsourcing to the cloud. Here’s a theoretical case study cross-examined with supporting evidence.
[See also: USA PATRIOT Act and the repercussions on the cloud, and Safe Harbor principles designed to protect European data from misuse in the United States.]
Taking real world evidence along with testimony from various sources, and printed communiques between various organisations including governments, and those who provide cloud services, this post will provide the relevant evidence to support the case that European data can be vulnerable to U.S. law.
Though written evidence plays a crucial element in this research, these issues are hypothetical. They are likely to remain that way since the Patriot Act operates at the highest level of the legal framework. The law is designed to be theorised, and tested and debated in the courts. This series of posts is designed solely to raise awareness for future discussion.
Though this case study does not focus on one particular institution, it can be applied to any school, college or university outside of the United States, which has an outsourced communications infrastructure - like email - to the cloud.
In Europe, there are at least 300 universities with over 5 million students that have outsourced student and/or staff email to Microsoft’s Live@edu service or Google Apps for Education.
A former Microsoft employee explained to me in June 2010 that the UK and the EU believe they have “nothing to worry about” when it comes to the USA PATRIOT Act, because of the “vast geographic distance to the United States”. In regards to numbers:
“Uptake in the UK has been huge. It has been one of the most successful Live@edu adoption areas. But there is something amiss about the issues in Canada.”
One of Google’s customers is the University of Cambridge, which has not only published their contract with Google on its website, but also notes there the existence of the Safe Harbor framework, and the risk to the disclosure of data under US law for ‘national security considerations’.
This has nothing to do with sensibility... with a name like Linux Geek I thought you'd know that! 
