The USA Patriot Act is having far-reaching effects on the kinds of data that wind up on some academics' computers in Canada. Canadian colleges, responding to provincial laws passed in reaction to the Patriot Act, are preventing professors from entering the United States with students' private data on their laptops and limiting the locations of servers where academic data are stored. The provincial privacy laws call on government institutions, including public colleges, to keep data in Canada and away from the potential prying eyes of U.S. agencies given investigative powers under the Patriot Act. Colleges are now coming to grips with these regulations, but they are finding compliance confusing because of different laws in several provinces, each open to various interpretations.