The globe and Mail had an article yesterday entitled Patriot Act haunts Google service that talked about a risk of using cloud based web tools. Google, and others, offer tools ranging from storage space to blogging tools to wikis to on-line word processing. The issue is that your data is then housed by that entity, and is thus subject to the local government’s rules. Specifically, the US Patriot Act, and other laws that allow government surveillance of the data.

That poses real issues when the entity using the service is subject to privacy obligations regarding the data – either at law, or because of promises they have made their customers.

So the Canadian business opportunity is to process and store that data here, by a Canadian operation, so it is under Canadian jurisdiction and subject to our privacy laws.

Read the Globe article