Sen. Wyden: Your data’s yours no matter on whose server it lives


This is significant, and very welcome. US Sen. Wyden is quoted by the Washington Post as follows:

“Some will still argue that by sharing data freely with Facebook, Google, Mint, Uber, Twitter, Fitbit or Instagram, Americans are choosing to make that data public. But that is simply not the case,”

And he continues with one of my favorite examples:

“When I send an e-mail to my wife, or store a document in the cloud so I can review it later, my service provider and I have an agreement that my information will stay private. Neither of us have invited the government to have a peek.”

Not anybody else, for that matter, I would add. It’s not the service provider’s business either to look at the data (with the possible exception of using it to debug why it crashes the service provider’s cloud if it does; but that’s all I can think of.)

How did we ever get conditioned to think otherwise?

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