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.

	Created by Liam-Beckwith almost 10 years ago

This set of notes will discuss Cloud Computing and Ethics. We will focus on how users, data and developers are all affected by ethics in Computing.