As a freelance journalist, I like the idea of storing all my documents ‘in the cloud’ rather than on whichever of my computers I happen to be using at the time. If I need to check an item urgently, I can download it wherever I happen to be - borrowing someone else’s computer if I don’t happen to be carrying one of my own.

That, after all, is how I handle the emails I send and receive (and, no, I don’t ask staff to print them out and attach them to the relevant paper file, as suggested in a recent letter to the Gazette that should surely have been published in the ‘memory lane’ column).

I know that the cloud, for these purposes, is no more than a metaphor. When I store my files there, I am simply sending them via the internet to another computer in a large warehouse with racks of servers that happens to be located... Located where, exactly? In the UK? In the US? In France, Switzerland, Uzbekistan? I have no idea. And I’m not too worried - so long as the company storing my data looks after it carefully, doesn’t let anyone else read it and lets me use it when I need it.

But what if I were a solicitor, storing clients’ files online? Wouldn’t my clients be entitled to know which country was hosting their data and what approach its government took to the protection of their personal privacy? Perhaps its data laws are so weak that there is nothing to stop the company that owns the server from copying my files. Or perhaps its rules are so severe that a local court could freeze all the data, preventing my clients from accessing their own information.

I would also need to know whether data relating to my firm’s clients was being stored separately from data uploaded by another firm. My competitor or its clients might be the subject of police inquiries, perhaps because fraud was suspected. The servers holding their data might be seized and removed for analysis. At the very least, the data could be copied and viewed. If my clients’ data is on the same computer, wouldn’t that be a breach of my duty of confidentiality?

What if you are just not very happy with the level of service provided by your cloud computing company? Could you move your business to a rival company and get them to forward all your data? According to Forensic Risk Alliance (FRA), a specialist consultancy with offices in London and Washington, it all depends on the agreement you have with your service provider. There are three levels of service and you need to know which you are purchasing.

You might simply rent space on a server, providing all your own operating system and software. This is known as ‘infrastructure as a service’. One provider is Amazon web services (no, they don’t just sell books). The next option is called ‘platform as a service’. The provider offers you standard software and you can allocate resources to individuals within your organisation. Examples include Microsoft Windows Azure and Google App Engine.

The third version - and the easiest for individuals to use - is ‘software as a service’. This includes popular applications such as Facebook, Google Docs, Dropbox and Microsoft Office 365. One service you are bound to provide for your staff is email. But can you monitor how it’s used? It all depends where you happen to be, according to Toby Duthie, a partner in FRA. ‘If you’re an American corporation, the emails and documents generated by your employees will belong to the company. It can search for fraud, theft, sex or whatever. If you do that in France without consent, it’s illegal. There are laws that say employees are allowed to use email for a certain element of personal usage and therefore data protection laws attach.’

And if you’re a US company storing its data in Europe, you may be caught in a conflict of laws. What are you to do if a US court orders you to disclose information held in France that is blocked from disclosure by a French statute? It would not be the first time this has happened. And where’s the best place to store your data? It rather depends on whether you want it to be readily accessible or locked in a Swiss-style vault.

Indeed, says Duthie, former totalitarian countries such as Argentina and Hungary are much stricter on data protection than the US. ‘If you ring up a pizza delivery shop in the US and give your home address and mobile number, the shop can sell that information to anyone it wants.’ But what if we could break free from national jurisdictions and really store our data in the clouds? Satellites are the obvious solution but there may be a more down-to-earth alternative.

Greg Mason, another FRA partner, tells me Google has recently patented a way of storing data ‘in the ocean’. I find this concept hard to grasp until he tells me that the concept is for a floating server, powered by the waves and cooled by the water. The image of a pirate radio station comes to mind, moored in international waters. Or perhaps a ghost ship, speaking to the world but going nowhere.

It sounds like fantasy and the jurisdictional aspects would make for a fiendish exam question. But it might just work; after all, these computer folk don’t spend all their time with their heads in the cloud.