A Brokering Framework for Assessing Legal Risks in Big Data and the Cloud

“Cloud computing” and “Big Data” are amongst the most hyped-up terms and buzzwords of the moment. After decades in which individuals and companies used to host their data and applications using their own IT infrastructure, the world has seen the stunning transformation of the Internet. Major shifts occurred when these infrastructures began to be outsourced to public Cloud providers to match commercial expectations. Storing, sharing and transferring data and databases over the Internet is convenient, yet legal risks cannot be eliminated. Legal risk is a fast-growing area of research and covers various aspects of law. Current studies and research on Cloud computing legal risk assessment have been, however, limited in scope and focused mainly on security and privacy aspects. There is little systematic research on the risks, threats and impact of the legal issues inherent to database rights and “ownership” rights of data. Database rights seem to be outdated and there is a significant gap in the scientific literature when it comes to the understanding of how to apply its provisions in the Big Data era. This means that we need a whole new framework for understanding, protecting and sharing data in the Cloud. The scheme we propose in this chapter is based on a risk assessment-brokering framework that works side by side with Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This proposed framework will provide better control for Cloud users and will go a long way to increase confidence and reinforce trust in Cloud computing transactions

Control, care, and conviviality in the politics of technology for sustainability

This article discusses currently neglected distinctions between control, care, and conviviality in the politics of technology for sustainability. We conceptualize control as the ambition to maintain fictitious borders between hierarchically ordered categories such as subjects and objects. This ambition is materialized into a wide range of Modern technological innovations, including genome editing and deep sea mining. Contrasting with control, we conceptualize values of care that constitute socio-technical practices where connections are prioritized over categories and hierarchy is countered with egalitarian commitment. In caring practices, objects are thus treated as subjects, often within political contexts that are dominated by ambitions to control. Building on care, we explore hopes for conviviality as mutualistic autonomy and decolonial self-realization to orient plural socio-technical pathways for moving beyond Modernity. We argue that such pathways are crucial for democratic transformations to sustainability. We illustrate our concepts using two brief case studies of agricultural developments. The first case discusses the politics of control in agricultural biotechnologies in Belgium. The second case reports on care within rural people's coping strategies in a south Indian "green revolution" landscape laden with control. In conclusion, we emphasize the need to situate attempted materializations of control, care, and conviviality in specific historical junctures. Situated understandings of the interplay between control, care, and conviviality can help realize sustainability that does not reproduce the centralizing, control-driven logic of Modern technocratic development