Fact Check: Yes, Kamala Harris Once Said Cloud Storage Exists 'Above Us,' Not in a 'Physical Place'

Claim:

U.S. Vice President and 2024 presidential candidate Kamala Harris once explained cloud storage thus: "It's on your laptop, and it's then therefore up here in this cloud, that exists above us, right? It's no longer in a physical place."

Rating:

Correct Attribution ( About this rating? )

Context:

Harris made the remark during a speech in 2010 to illustrate the evolving legal scope of the concept of "privacy" to encompass wholly digital possessions as well as physical ones.

In early August 2024, social media users shared a video in which U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris ventured an explanation of how cloud storage works, purportedly saying: "It's on your laptop, and it's then therefore up here in this cloud, that exists above us, right? It's no longer in a physical place."

One such post received more than 12 million views and 79,000 likes, as of this writing.

We received multiple messages from readers asking us to verify the authenticity of the video. "There is a video supposedly showing Kamala Harris explaining cloud storage. Is this real?" One wrote. "It is being portrayed as recent, when it is extremely obvious that she is a lot younger looking and sounding," another message read.

The video is authentic , though it was taken many years earlier, during a 2010 event hosted by Google. Many accounts that shared the clip in mid-2024 wrongly implied that it was a recent video. The clip in question begins at minute 33:58 of the full video below.

The event was a part of a lecture series called "Talks at Google" — which is still active, as of this writing — and took place on Sept. 14, 2010. While the viral clip is only about 20 seconds long, the original video was just over an hour long. At the time of the interview, Harris was serving as the district attorney of San Francisco and running for the office of attorney general of California.

Harris made the remark to illustrate how the legal scope of "privacy" was evolving since the advent of the internet. When asked about her approach to regulating or enforcing online privacy without "stifling innovation," she responded that because Fourth Amendment laws were developed literally around the structure of a house, "we have to — lawyers, judges, government — realize that times are changing, and we're gonna have to figure out a way to adapt." The transcript of the relevant section of her response is as follows:

As a lawyer, you know, we all know the Constitution of the United States has a Fourth Amendment and that is the law that surrounds what is reasonable and unreasonable search and seizure. And so underlying any analysis about what would be a reasonable or unreasonable taking of your stuff by government or anybody else is the concept of what is a reasonable expectation of privacy. So the laws that have been written and are on the books to deal with this issue of privacy are laws that developed primarily — and this gets back to 20th century versus the 21st century world, right, the laws are still very much grounded in the 20th century and before.

So the laws that came up around privacy were developed around literally the structure of a house. Well what can you see from the street if you were looking through the window of that house? Versus what you would be able to see or take if you opened the door of that house, versus what — right? What is your reason, versus what you're doing in the front yard of that house? And so what expectation of privacy do you attach to whatever is placed in that particular place as it relates to that house?

So given where we are now, so no longer are you necessarily keeping those private files in some file cabinet that's locked in the basement of the house. It's on your laptop, and it's then therefore up here in this cloud that exists above us, right? It's no longer in a physical place. And so we have to — lawyers, judges, government — realize that times are changing and we're gonna have to figure out a way to adapt. And adapt to the realities of where we are.

At the time, public understanding of "the cloud" was in its early stages, as evidenced by Google Trends results of the phrase – within the category "Internet & Telecom" – spanning from 2004 to present.

(Google Trends)

In sum, because the clip is authentic — meaning it is not AI-generated and genuinely originated from a 2010 interview with Google — we have rated the claim as "Correct Attribution."

Sources:

Talks at Google. First Woman District Attorney | Kamala Harris | Talks at Google . 2010. YouTube , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJllQ9d3pYM.