Amazon Gets an SLA (But I Still Can’t Use It)
Amazon’s announcement that its S3 service now has a service level agreement (SLA) is getting a lot of coverage, but I still can’t use it for class projects: Ontario’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Acts (FIPPA) don’t allow me to store sensitive information (e.g., students’ work) in jurisdictions that permit secret warrants, like those mandated by the USA PATRIOT Act. It wouldn’t even help if Amazon ran a cluster farm in Canada, since the PATRIOT Act applies to subsidiaries of American firms operating in other countries as well. Funny, sort of: an American government shreds the Constitution a little, and my students can’t play with enterprise-scale clusters…
Later: see also this discussion of courseware built around such technologies — again, off limits to Ontario schools thanks to the current administration in Washington.
I think that it’s a bit of a stretch to define student work as “sensitive”. You could easily let them put their own information there and tell them to strip anything “sensitive” from it.
Could you gpg encrypt the data before storing it?
r.e. student information, anything with a student number, name & grade etc. is sensitive information. See FIPPA section 21.3(c) for an example clause covering privacy and education.
r.e. encryption, the limitation is on storage, not form, so any subpoena could include a request for gpg key(s).