Sorry, Eva, but I don't believe I can support this proposal because of the recommendation for 'cloud' storage. I'm not an expert on that, but I do know enough to understand that it's fairly easy for a tech savvy person to set up a cloud storage system and probably pretty difficult to determine what kind of security is provided there. Also, on it's face, it goes contrary to the requirement that a CA notary maintain a journal under their "exclusive control".
By way of example, the company I use for my occasional IT needs offers their business clients their own in-house cloud service. They're a fairly small, local operation, with just a handful of employees. I know the owners so I know enough to have trusted them with servicing my pc the couple of times I've needed it, but even with them, I wouldn't feel comfortable having them store my highly sensitive journal data. Not only have I not personally checked out every person there who has access to their cloud servers, our state law doesn't allow that.
I get that you're trying to change that, but the way your petition is written, it doesn't offer or require any new assurances that this data will be kept secure. I believe that the need for notaries to protect people's non-public personal info is greater than ever. My bias is that switching this type of data collection shouldn't come on the leading edge of technology. It will likely happen some day, but hopefully we'll have much, much more secure data collection and protection technologies by then. If and when we get there, I'll be able to fully support this idea, but not before.
Personally, if I needed a document notarized and the notary was using this type of journal today, I'd go find another notary... |