by Daniel J. Solove
Increasingly, companies, hospitals, schools, and other organizations are using cloud service providers (and also other third party data service providers) to store and process the personal data of their customers, patients, clients, and others. When an entity shares people’s personal data with a cloud service provider, this data is protected in large part through a contract between the organization and the cloud service provider.
In many cases, these contracts fail to contain key protections of data. For example, a study conducted by Fordham School of Law’s Center on Law and Information Policy revealed that contracts between K-12 school districts and cloud service providers lacked essential terms for the protection of student data. I blogged about this study previously here.