Coud Computing And Privacy

Software as a services or sharing sites or whatever such facility one uses on the net can be termed under cloud computing. One common feature of this paradigm of computing is that data is stored on public data centers. Does that mean these data have a less privacy that the data on your desktop! This article brings up this interesting issue. Right now things are undefined and the general perception is that intelligence agencies or law enforcement agencies think these data are more accessible and less protected by the strict privacy environment regarding data on machines owned by you. How should these issues be tackled!

Personally, I was thinking, why shold not we apply the Swiss banking laws here. We are effectively banking our data with these agencies like the Flicr or the Salesforce.com. Unless criminal intent can be proved the privacy about the data on these data ceters should rock solid like the Swiss banks! What say you?