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He said the fourth amendment to the US Constitution provided that the people could "be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures'¦"
This amendment also provided a method for an unreasonable search to be called "reasonable" and, therefore, constitutionally valid - the issuance of a warrant.
"The court's 'reasonable expectation of privacy' test says you had to have a reasonable expectation that your stuff was private, but that it also must be something that society itself would objectively recognise as reasonably private," Asprey said.
If one's data was at a third-party provider, the interpretation was that it was not protected by the fourth amendment.
"Let's generalise this to the cloud. Historically, Dropbox and Microsoft's SkyDrive and Trend Micro's SafeSync let you keep your copyright and IP rights to the files you upload to their cloud storage. This is a sane and normal approach for businesses," Asprey said.
However, the Google terms of service read, "Your Content in our Services: When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence (sic) to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.
"The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps)."
Asprey said the "terms of service for Google Drive absolutely destroy any argument that content uploaded to your cloud storage service has a reasonable expectation of privacy. Therefore, data on Google Drive is not subject to subpoena and is clearly open to viewing by law enforcement under the Third Party Doctrine."
He added: "Google is one of the largest cloud providers on the planet. Once Google decimates Fourth Amendment protections for their cloud storage, how long will it take for law enforcement and courts to make the argument that all cloud storage shouldn't be protected by the Fourth Amendment? Not long. Google is a large corporate citizen, large enough to set precedent with their actions."
