Download This PaperThe Right not to Forget: Cloud Based Services Moratoriums in War Zones and Data Portability Rights
Rights to Privacy and Data Protection in Armed Conflict (Asaf Lubin and Russel Buchan, eds, 2022 Forthcoming)
11 Pages Posted: 28 Oct 2021
Date Written: September 15, 2021
Abstract
Various technologies have joined forces in recent years to outsource human memory. Digital cameras, now an essential feature of cellular devices, allows individuals to document every aspect of their lives; Cloud based services allows them to store and backup such data remotely, and to use it on many online platforms. The data stored in the cloud, of course, also contains copies of valuable personal documents one accumulates during a lifetime: personal correspondence, work related files, copies of high school and university diplomas, scans of contracts and titles, and much more.
Online services enable us also to develop a digital persona through which fosters alternative ways of social relations, which are at times liberated from constraints of distances or language barriers. Individuals may spend long years cultivating their digital personae and their online communities which in turn reward them with reputational and symbolic capital, as well as emotional support.
However, the globally available online services facilitating both digital personae and cloud-based storage of highly valuable personal data are provided by private, non-state actors, whose business model may develop over time in manners unexpected to their users. Reviewing the Terms of Service of common cloud-based services shows that most service providers reserve the right to purge accounts which were inactive for prolonged periods, or partially delete data related to premium services when users default on their periodical payment. Flexible business models monetizing on the captive audience of online services may be deemed acceptable in peaceful times, when habitual users can respond promptly to changes adversely affecting their online persona and data by preemptively relocating their personal data or backing it up.
Although in recent years some internet memes jokingly added ‘Wifi’ and ‘Battery life’ as the new basis of Maslow’s hierarchal pyramid of human needs, those will be of less concern to individuals undergoing humanitarian crisis, struggling for survival, medical care and sustenance. Humanitarian calamities may also halt automatic payments to services providers, with the collapse of local financial infrastructure on top of the potential reallocation of individual resources to provide for more immediate needs.
Once the dust settles, refugees and survivors may wish to regain access to their online accounts, which may at time contain their only memories of perished loved ones, and the only ways to contact family members and friends presumed lost in the fog of war, as well as provide access to important medical, academic, professional and other irreplaceable personal documents that might be of importance to refuges striving to establish themselves in a foreign country.
While under regular circumstances, such accounts – either inactive or defaulting on their periodical fees to their providers – are treated by service providers subject to changing boilerplate terms of service and fluctuating business models, during humanitarian crisis individuals are unable to promptly respond to online warnings and to timely realize their data portability rights. They are in risk of having their retained memories – at times, all that left from their former, pre-calamity lives – deleted.
This chapter aims to illustrate this problem, and offers an outline for a possible solution by establishing a moratorium mechanism under which cloud-based service providers will refrain from any deletion of data or purging of personal accounts or users that may be affected by the event. Their data will be retained for a sufficiently long period, that will allow survivors access to their personal accounts and data. Accordingly, defining the geographical domain of the moratorium could evolve as the event progresses
The precariousness of refugees, displaced persons and survivors of humanitarian disasters emphasizes the importance of the right not to forget, as conceptualized in this chapter. While cloud storage renders the trope of rescuing the family photo album from a burning house obsolete, without a mechanism ensuring that its digital successor remains stored in the cloud, our memory – and a part of ourselves – will fade away.
Keywords: Cloud, digital rights, data portability, refugees, digital memory
JEL Classification: K19, K20, K29
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation