By Robert Gehrke. 05/15/19.
It’s all on “The Cloud” these days — our documents, our photos, our finances, our music, our lives.
It’s so ubiquitous and growing so fast that one recent study said that by 2025 the cloud will be home to an estimated 175 zettabytes of data — whatever the heck that means.
Actually, a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes, all stashed on the system of remote servers that make up the all-knowing cloud that didn’t even really exist 15 years ago. The researchers said that if that data was burned onto CDs the stack would reach the moon 23 times, which would probably look a little like my car in college.
With all that data floating around out there, we probably don’t often consider who can access it and when and how.
As of Tuesday, Utah became the first state in the nation with a law on the books making it explicit that police and law enforcement must obtain a warrant from a judge before obtaining digital data from third parties, including e-mail providers and cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive.
Rep. Craig Hall, R-West Valley City, sponsored House Bill 57 after reading about Missouri voters amending that state’s constitution to add electronic records to existing protections — patterned after the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — prohibiting warrantless searches and seizures of physical records.
“Statutes have not kept pace with new technology. For example, I think everyone would agree … if I sat down and drafted a document and saved it on my hard drive, if law enforcement wanted that document they would have to get a warrant,” said Hall.
“It’s a little less clear if I sit down at my laptop and store it on Dropbox or Google Drive. … There’s a lot of case law out there that says once you transmit information to a third party you lose that legitimate expectation of privacy.”…
Continue reading at The Salt Lake Tribune HERE.
