Cloud Computing & Ethics

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Ethics

Firstly, ethics refers to well based standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues.

Secondly, ethics refers to the study and development of one's ethical standards. As mentioned above, feelings, laws, cultural and social norms can deviate from what is ethical. So it is necessary to constantly examine one's standards to ensure that they are reasonable and well-founded.

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What's so special about Computer Ethics?

Computers are the following:

Uniquely complex and connected

Uniquely fast and pervasive

Uniquely malleable and reprogrammable

Uniquely cost effective and available to all

Uniquely adept to producing perfect digital copies

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Computer Ethics

Some of the common issues arising from these characteristics include privacy, ownership and copyright, and liability. Some of these are covered by professional ethics - as a graduate you are entering a specific profession. Others are covered by personal ethics.

Costlow (2002) suggested that, if faced wth an ethical dilemma, ask:

Is the action legal?

Is it wrong?

If the problem is grey, ask "How would this look in the newspaper?"

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Cloud and Data

Many of the services we use daily are cloud powered. Your data is stored and duplicated across data centres around the world. Different countries have different laws applied to data. However, questions of cloud data ownership, security, and privacy are frequent headline grabbers.

Users

Your data is stored in datacentres. To be precise, over 90% of Facebook datacentres are in the US, with the exception of one, despite over 70% of user base outside the US.

All Twitter datacentres are in the US and the majority of Google datacentres are in the US. It's easy to make the assumption that most of your data used by these services will be under US jurisdiction, not the UK's.

So the moral of the story is read the TOS!

Developers

"You are a lead developer on a new social media messaging platform that targets mobile. You look to the cloud to provides scale and storage - what do you need to think about?"

Well firstly, you need to be aware of connectivity alternatives apart from the cloud. You will also need to focus on data centres; will you own or rent one which leads on to security. Will you depend on the physical location and the governing laws? The Vendor will also need to have the ability and policies in place to assure confidentiality and security. Any unclear policies need to be followed up with other policies in place for data a data breach notice. Finally, there need to be an assurance of the destruction of data upon the termination of the contract.

The vendor and the organisation also has to be aware of numerous issues as well, such as their process for complying with litigation, any failures regarding the back-up of data, the encryption process, bankruptcy, the non-repayment of services, disgruntled insiders, hackers, server crashes and technical failures, viruses, data corruption, business interruption, absolute loss and the change of cloud providers, so a exit strategy needs to be in place.

As you can see, there is a lot to think about. Developers need to be aware of the potential ethical implications of using cloud providers. Transparency is good and a clear ToS is key, but nobody else will do this for you. A service may live and die by its ToS.

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Cloud Providers

It is important to read the Terms of Services (ToS) or the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for for the following reasons:

Data Ownership

Confidentiality

Data Destruction Policies

Business Interrupt and Continuity

Data Access

Security Policy

We will only look at the first three as they are the most important in the context of privacy. The last three are important for business continuity in the event of loss of service, but there is some overlap between them.

Data Ownership

The thorny issue of data ownership has caused businesses and developers to wonder if it's safe to turn their data over to cloud providers and trust it off-site on someone else's servers.

Some cloud providers, say that data ownership isn't even a question. The customer owns it. No 'ifs' and 'buts'. But it is up to the developer and cloud provider to spell out exactly what it has access to and what happens in the event that data is unavailable or inaccessible.

Confidentiality

Will your organisations details or data be shared with any third parties? Are there any geographical variances in data privacy laws were your data is stored? Are there any providers tools deployed that automatically scan your data stored in the cloud?

In terms of data mining, Google mines all of your data. Microsoft OneDrive deploys image detection. Could these compromise your organisation's or customers confidentiality?

Data Destruction

You may need to comply with local government laws on data storage and destruction, particularly for sensitive data. How long can you keep it in the cloud? Is it easy to move to move the data to another provider? If you close your account with the cloud provider, is your data really destroyed immediately?

Are there any copies kept and for how long? Can you request an inventory of your assets in the cloud?

Security

There are a lot of hinges on the cloud provider to meet the ethical, moral and business expectation of an organisation. There are implications for multiple stakeholders such as the; end users, developers and cloud providers.

It is important to read the SLAs and ToSs line by line as hindsight is a great thing.