Ethical Virus

Ethical cloud

Cloud computing is rapidly gaining traction in business. It offers businesses online services on demand (such as Gmail, iCloud and Salesforce) and allows them to cut costs on hardware and IT support. This is the first paper in business ethics dealing with this new technology. It analyzes the informational duties of hosting companies that own and operate cloud computing datacentres (e.g., Amazon). It considers the cloud services providers leasing 'space in the cloud' from hosting companies (e.g., Dropbox, Salesforce). And it examines the business and private 'clouders' using these services. The first part of the paper argues that hosting companies, services providers and clouders have mutual informational (epistemic) obligations to provide and seek information about relevant issues such as consumer privacy, reliability of services, data mining and data ownership. The concept of interlucency is developed as an epistemic virtue governing ethically effective communication. The second part considers potential forms of government restrictions on or proscriptions against the development and use of cloud computing technology. Referring to the concept of technology neutrality, it argues that interference with hosting companies and cloud services providers is hardly ever necessary or justified. It is argued, too, however, that businesses using cloud services (e.g., banks, law firms, hospitals etc. storing client data in the cloud) will have to follow rather more stringent regulations.

Keywords: Cloud computing, Information ethics, Privacy, Epistemic virtue
Introduction
Businesses and individual users alike are embracing online software in order to process, share and synchronize data, recruit personnel, organize customer services and sales, and for an increasing number of other purposes. Computing resources (especially software, memory space, CPU power, and maintenance routines) are becoming services on demand, offered by online providers that store and process files in large datacentres. This new Information Technology (IT) paradigm of cloud computing offers huge advantages in terms of installation, configuration, updating, compatibility, costs and computational power (Zhang et al. 2010), and in the last few years cloud computing has already provided enormous benefits to a large number of users. However, it also comes with a number of potential risks. The year 2010, for instance, witnessed a huge cyber attack on the popular cloud email services of Gmail, and the sudden discontinuation of cloud services to WikiLeaks by Amazon. There followed the 2013 NSA spying scandal, the 2014 nude photo iCloud hack and the Sony hack, with hackers increasingly turning to the cloud.

This is the first paper in business ethics dealing with cloud computing.1 It employs an informational or epistemic ethical approach (Floridi 2013, 2014a). After a brief overview of cloud computing technology and a survey of the relevant stakeholders, we discuss two issues.

First, we describe the educational pressure on clouders, that is, initiatives to educate and/or inform the individuals and business corporations that make use of cloud computing services. We observe that cloud computing suits the interests and values of those who adopt a deflated view of the value of ownership and an inflated view of freedom (De Bruin 2010). This is especially, but not exclusively, Generation X or the Millennials, who care less about where, for instance, a certain photograph is stored and who owns it (Facebook? the photographer? the photographed?) and care more about having the opportunity and freedom to do things with it (sharing it with friends, posting it on websites, using it as a background for one's smartphone). They were aptly described as Generation Cloud in a report written by researchers at Goldsmith College, London, and sponsored by Rackspace, a large hosting company.2 And they are part of a move towards an Internet of Things in which values shift 'from the product to the services the product represents', that is, the Everything-as-a-Service world where one does not need to buy and own, say, a book, but only a licence to read it on one's Kindle or other device (Melin 2015). We use insights gained from the epistemic study of freedom (De Bruin 2010) to argue that this warrants particular forms of educational pressure. Not only must the clouders discharge their epistemic duties. The cloud computing industry must also develop radically different ways to communicate with its customers. The industry should have concern for the virtue of interlucency, as we call it (De Bruin 2015). It should communicate with customers, provide them with information about what the technology does, and actively check whether these customers understand what it attempts to communicate.