Official Documents in the Cloud

Software	None
Covers	Human factors, attitudes to security and privacy, computer law
Skills Required	Interest in cloud computing, preferably interest in security
Challenge	Conceptual ???? Technical ??? Programming

Brief Description

People have and require access to various official documents, such as birth certificates, tax records, driving licences, title deeds for houses, certificates for academic qualifications, and the like. In some cases the documents are valuable and difficult to replace, so people need to take great care of their paper copies. It can sometimes happen that people sign forms and get given pieces of paper not realising that they are important and need to be looked after because they'll be needed years later. Having official and definitive versions of documents readily available in an online respository would be enormously helpful. Often, branches of the government and commercial organizations need access to people's official documentation, but the documents should be kept secure and confidential. These organizations might also want to provide documents in a systematic and unloseable way, to cut out the vagaries of individual treatment of pieces of paper.

While the advantages of supplementing paper-based official documents with electronic versions, or eliminating the need for paper-based official documents, are clear and enormous, obstacles (besides the technical security challenges) need to be overcome to make this a reality. Your challenge is to figure out what they are, whether they are surmountable (or ought to be surmounted), and how to tackle them. Does this idea belong only in Cloud Cookoo Land?

Variants

The computer ethics project: What are the ethical and legal problems involved in handing responsibility for personal official documents such as birth certificates to third parties, namely the providers of cloud-based document repositories? What should be done about governing access to people's personal documents in different situations, for instance when people are incapacitated or very elderly? Would any aspect of this be made easier or more difficult by having the government provide the document repository? How would this be made more complicated by the fact that many people exist and have official paperwork in more than one country? What are the advantages and disadvantages of legally allowing governments to have integrated sets of records on individuals rather than be legally compelled to keep different sets of records separate?

The identity theft project: Institutional precautions against identity theft are poor and involve making unreasonable demands on people having and keeping confidential paperwork that they shouldn't need to worry about for any reason other than doing the government or private companies' work for them. How much personal data and how many official documents about people really need to be kept confidential, and for what reasons? What would be involved in having sufficiently robust defences against identity theft and other forms of fraud without assuming that only the owners have access to particular documents?

The social attitudes project: What do people really think about how their official forms and records ought to be handled? How much should access to them be restricted, and why? Are people concerned about non-problems, or too complacent, or both? How do attitudes and beliefs differ with ages or experience or culture? Why?

The development project: Can you prototype a way to manage official documents in the cloud? What would the technical infrastructure for public management of people's private documents look like? How in practice can authentication be handled? Is Blockchain the future of officialdom? See www.itpro.co.uk/cloud/29202/sony-blockchain-based-service-aims-to-revamp-how-qualifications-are-shared for a brief account of an attempt to do this.

Any project like this might focus on one country, not necessarily Britain, or be a comparative study of two or more countries.

Cross-Reference

Building a system to handle official documents in the cloud is a separate project - or one of a number of separate projects, taking the idea in different directions: see Cloud-Based Document Repository.

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