On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: > Another thing to consider when buying 'cloud computing' is data > ownership. If your data is on someone else's machine, do you really own > it? Posession *is* 9/10ths of the law after all. > > If your data isn't really sensitive, and is easily replicable, then this > isn't much of a concern. If you have some valuable/sensitive data, you > should keep your property rights and security in mind. There may be some > clauses buried in the agreements which make data ownership less > clear-cut than you might like. There would not be obvious identifying information in the data (e.g., names, addresses, phone numbers, SS#s), but the genotype data are unique to an individual and could theoretically be used to identify other data (e.g., disease status) for someone whose genotypes are available through some other source. We can't put the data out there "in the cloud," I don't think. Mike