Privacy and security in cloud computing will be best defended by...

Las Vegas. The speed at which technology evolves and consumers adopt the technology frequently puts privacy at risk and it will be up to those on the industry side to make certain that their customers are only giving up parts of their data they are willing to give up. Much of the progress on security and privacy in the cloud must come from better informing consumers of exactly what they are and aren’t giving up when they upload their information to another company, said Sid Stamm, lead privacy engineer at Mozilla. As systems become increasingly complex, it will become harder and harder to know and understand the privacy risks involved, he said. Part of that issue is the idea of informed consent, the long terms of services documents that are often agreed to yet rarely read, said Scott Morrison, chief architect at Layer 7. The scrutiny on the agreements is largely falling to public interest groups that can spend the time and resources to make the public aware of the poor actors, said Reavis. Still, part of the equation of companies such as Facebook and Twitter letting consumers use their services for free is the tradeoff of some privacy, said Rip Gerber, CEO of Locaid Technologies. It’s also in the best interest of the companies and their brands that control that information to only use it for purposes the public seems willing to accept, said Gerber. Among the major concerns is the question of what bad actors could use stolen cloud data for that hasn’t yet been considered, said Stamm.