Privacy on the Clouds - Debatable still?

IT enterprise customers have been cringing on the privacy aspects of public clouds. However, pundits and cloud vendors have been shouting atop their voices on how the privacy aspects have been dealt with.

Privacy on the public cloud will face a litmus test with the current Wikileaks shock wave. Wikileaks reported hacking of its website ever since it has started flooding the media with disclosures. It claimed that a mass distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is preventing users from accessing the site.

Following that was the news item that Wikileaks was moving to Amazon Web Services EC2 cloud to host its website and data disclosures.The Inquirer reports that ever since Wikileaks reappeared on Amazon's EC2 cloud service, with visitors being re-directed to servers in Europe and the US.

Wiki Leaks moved from its private hosting to a public cloud. Given the circumstances, it could not afford to be on a DDOS attack for ever on its private cloud. At the same time, this move by Wikileaks is sure to raise eye-brows in the US government, A company publishing material that the US condemns and has publicly asked it to refrain from publishing is now hosted on the servers located in its own geography and under a well-known US Enterprise. It sure might be in the realms of US federal scrutiny under security acts but then what happens to all of Amazon's claims of data privacy on its clouds.