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

Vulnerable Workers in an Emerging Middle Eastern Economy: What are the Implications for HRM?

Dubai offers an example of the contradictions and tensions surrounding a development model based on migrant labour, foreign investment and a segmented labour market which has led to the exclusion of large segments of the labour force from basic forms of labour standards and protection. Unlike many other developing economies, Dubai does not possess large labour surpluses and a large informal labour market, but instead has constructed its labour market around distinct divisions within the workforce. Consequently, it is argued that, in line with building and developing civil institutions in the Middle East, there are several urgent labour reforms that are required to address the migrant workforce vulnerability and exclusion. This paper outlines the implications of these proposed reforms for human resource management (HRM) in Dubai, offering a framework that encompasses the responses required of strategic international HRM in combination with recommended human resource practices that can assist in reducing worker vulnerability