Your digital home is no longer your castle: how cloud computing transforms the (legal) relationship between individuals and their personal records

In line with the overall trend individuals’ personal affairs, too, are composed of digital records to an increasing amount. At about the same time, the era of local storage in end-user equipment is about to give way to remote computing where data resides on third party equipment (cloud computing). Once information, and even the most personal one, is no longer stored on personal equipment the relationship between individual users and their digital assets belonging to them is becoming increasingly abstract. This contribution focuses on the implications of cloud computing for individuals’ unpublicized digital records. The question to be answered is whether—taken together—the progressing virtualization and the disruption of physical control produce a backslide for individual positions of rights. The article introduces the legal treatment of users’ digital personal records and how a technical transformation in combination with disparate legal protection and prevailing commercial practices are bound to impact the distribution of rights and obligations.