An Ars interview with Oren Sreebny, “director of emerging technology for the central IT and networking unit at the University of Washington,” reveals an interesting confluence between law, technology, and education.
Q: [Regarding the] legal headaches that higher ed IT departments have to deal with. He said something like “We spend more time being lawyers than we do IT people because of all these government requirements.” Do you find the same thing to be true where you are?
A: If you were a typical corporation, it’s my impression that you’d have lots of control over your data, and you’d say “this stuff can’t move to the cloud, and we won’t let it.” But in higher ed you don’t have that much control over people, because it’s a more loosely knit confederation of enterprises, so it becomes more of an education problem than a control problem.
[emphasis original]
Certainly an addition to the “education problem” is that the laws aren’t crystal clear. Technologists either need access to lawyers, a legal education, or clear guidelines. This offers another perspective on nervous service providers.