Abstract
Cloud computing refers to delivering computing services over the internet. Although it has revolutionized data storage and accessibility, cloud computing presents several ethical challenges regarding privacy, environmental impact, economic stagnancy, and the digital divide. To ensure its ethical practice, engineers must be more cautious about cloud adoption, develop energy-efficient power solutions, and push for legal regulation.
Introduction
Amazon is a household name that is often associated with online retailing. This is what generates most of its revenue, but the company’s operating income stems from Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing service available for small or medium-sized organizations [1]. Cloud computing is the process of delivering computational resources over the internet. Once a client has accepted cloud services, their data is stored by cloud service providers.
These providers rent out and maintain physical equipment based on clientele demand, including massive, worldwide data centers packed with servers, storage, and networking equipment [2, 3]. They also offer various categories of services, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) [4]. While IaaS provides building blocks such as virtual machines, storage, and networking, PaaS and SaaS offer virtual platforms for developing and managing applications.
The many services available through cloud computing eliminate the user’s need to maintain physical infrastructure. Thus, industries of all sizes have begun to rely on cloud-based infrastructure for data storage, processing, and app deployment. In fact, the worldwide public cloud computing market has more than doubled since 2020, going from $314 billion to $678.9 billion in 2023 [5].
Overview of Cloud Computing:
There are several defining characteristics of cloud computing. Firstly, cloud computing services are highly scalable, unlike fixed physical servers that take time to install. Its high scalability comes from resource virtualization and the massive cloud infrastructure maintained by providers [6]. The technology is also pay-as-you-go; users only pay for the resources they consume instead of paying a fixed amount for a period of unlimited usage [7]. It is also highly accessible. The cloud’s virtuality means that one can access cloud computing services anywhere with internet access [7].
Cloud computing’s flexibility and scalability have allowed engineers to access advanced computational resources that were previously too complex for local devices to process.
Easier access to heavy computations has caused technological innovation to flourish across many industries [8]. For example, cloud computing has been applied to fields such as bioinformatics and drug design [9]. The widespread use of this technology reflects its economic benefits, as large amounts of data can be stored without having to pay for physical server maintenance. Statistics have shown that cloud computing can save organizations up to 37% on hardware costs and can process data up to 60% faster than traditional practices [10]. Plus, backups are a natural part of the cloud computing process, making data recovery reliable and easy [11].
Even though cloud computing services are very advantageous for industry use, current cloud practices are unethical. Clients entrust their data to service providers in order to enjoy the cloud’s benefits, raising concerns about data confidentiality [12]. Additionally, cloud computing data centers consume significant levels of energy that negatively impact the environment. Finally, the monopolistic nature of the cloud industry and the digital divide raise concerns over equitable access, both personally and commercially.
Right to Privacy:
Many modern industries are data-driven, meaning that they make informed decisions by collecting and analyzing vast amounts of user data. This user data often contains Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which raises concerns about privacy rights in cloud computing.
As one of the central rights defined in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,”
privacy rights refer to an individual’s entitlement to control the collection, use, and dissemination of their personal information [13]. Privacy rights are necessary for protecting personal security and preserving human dignity. Their preservation is essential to ethical cloud computing as clients entrust their data to providers.
However, cloud computing services are susceptible to cyber-attacks often resulting in data breaches, broken authentication, and account hacking [14]. These attacks endanger customer privacy [16]. One famous cloud breach incident was the 2022 BlueBleed Leak, which occurred due to misconfigured cloud buckets [15]. This incident was one of the largest data breaches, leaking over 2.4 TB of data belonging to 65,000 entities in 111 countries [16]. When a data leak occurs, it heightens customer vulnerability to identity theft, blackmail, and phishing attacks.
That’s because leaked data usually contains PII. When highly sensitive information is released, there is significant financial loss. On average, the global cost of a data breach in 2023 was $4.45 million, with finance firms losing approximately $5.9 million per data breach [17]. Data leaks are costly all around. Monetarily, they are expensive. Ethically, they violate a user’s right to privacy. As creators of the cloud, engineers are responsible for cloud integrity and safeguarding user data.
Environmental Concerns:
Furthermore, cloud computing has many environmental ramifications. Data centers require extensive air conditioning to ensure that servers don’t overheat. This accounts for more than 40% of electricity usage at any given data center [18]. The excessive use of backup servers at data centers also wastes a generous amount of electricity. As a result, only 6-12% of energy consumption is used for actual cloud services [18]. Annually, one out of 10,000 data centers consumes up to 200 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity. This is equivalent to the electricity needed to run 50,000 homes [19, 20]. A large demand for energy entails an increase in the burning of fossil fuels to provide that energy. Thus, data centers are responsible for a significant share of greenhouse gas emissions.
Emitting greenhouse gases goes against the common good principle and engineering code of conduct because these emissions contribute to global warming. Global warming has been linked to a rise in natural catastrophes such as heatwaves, floods, storms, and drought [21]. While heat waves and floods can cause heat stroke and waterborne illnesses, drought and storms can destroy agricultural infrastructure. This could threaten food security by devastating agricultural livelihood of farms and causing food prices to skyrocket [21]. Food insecurity could lead to malnutrition and weakened immune systems across all species [22]. These environmental expenses could affect future generations, who would endure deteriorated environments despite not directly contributing to them.
According to the National Society of Professional Engineers, we shall “hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public” [23]. Yet, engineers who construct and maintain cloud-computing data centers challenge this duty, as the environmental impacts of cloud infrastructures go against societal well-being. Therefore, cloud computing services violate the common good principle that necessitates a healthy planet for humans to thrive.
Economic Impact:
The negative consequences of cloud computing extend to the economy, making current cloud practices unethical under the utilitarian approach. Cloud computing services are mostly pay-as-you-go. Thus, the more clients that use computation resources, the more cloud service providers profit. As a result, cloud service providers attempt to retain users by charging high exit rates. This results in vendor lock-in and monopolization of markets [24]. For example, when a software company called 37Signals migrated away from their provider company, they faced up to $400,000 in fees just for moving their data out of the cloud [25]. High start-up infrastructure costs and the cloud’s complex technicalities also contribute to cloud monopolization, which has reduced market competition and consumer surplus [26, 27].
According to utilitarianism, current monopolized cloud practices are unethical due to induced economic stagnancies, which would not exist in a more competitive market [28]. The lack of alternatives perpetuated by the cloud monopoly inhibits innovation. A lack of competition in the market allows for stagnant production. This eliminates the potential for societal benefits of cloud computing [29]. To enhance overall social welfare, engineers should pursue an optimally competitive, diverse market.
Inequities in Cloud Computing:
Another ethical oversight of cloud computing is that not all citizens benefit from it equally, even though everyone shares the environmental and economic ramifications. For instance, the monopolized cloud market enables a range of unfair and unjust practices that violate principles of economic fairness, equal opportunity, and rights protection. One unfair practice that often arises is price discrimination, where service providers charge customers differently while providing the same services [30]. This practice can make essential cloud services unaffordable for some socioeconomic groups, undermining fairness and justice.
Further, the cloud monopoly encourages service providers to abuse market power through its anti-competitive practices. These practices tend to put competitors at a disadvantage [31, 28]. Currently, the cloud computing monopoly enables Big Tech companies to accrue profits at the expense of fair treatment, open markets, and equal digital opportunities, perpetuating socioeconomic divisions that must be reformed.
The digital divide also concerns fairness and justice outside of the cloud market. Cloud computing services provide immense computing power, storage, and software capabilities over the internet. However, access to these cloud resources requires reliable, high-speed internet, something many developing nations lack [32]. As of 2023, more than one-third of the world’s population did not have access to the internet [33]. This digital exclusion prevents a significant portion of the global population from participating in the technological and economic opportunities generated by cloud computing. Consequently, individuals without internet access are not able to provide data to the machine learning services offered by the cloud [34]. As a result, the machine-learning models that cloud computing relies on make unfair decisions that often ignore these marginalized groups, raising concerns about systematic injustice [35].
As professionals entrusted with shaping the future, engineers have a moral duty to promote social justice. This duty includes the promotion of public trust and assurance that their technology is equitably accessible to all members of society. When engineers prioritize profit over responsible development, they erode the public’s confidence in engineering. Neglecting these crucial ethical considerations would contradict the responsibilities of an engineer. To uphold the principles of justice we must advocate for inclusive design principles and seek cloud solutions that bridge the digital divide. Settling for the status quo is not an option; as engineers, we are responsible for shaping a better future for all.
Conclusion
Cloud computing has revolutionized how modern industries store and access data, offering valuable benefits such as scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. However, cloud computing has several ethical considerations that demand engineer-driven solutions. Entrusting sensitive information to cloud service providers creates data privacy concerns, requiring careful security regulations. The environmental and ecological impacts of cloud computing raise common good and utilitarian concerns. The digital divide also reveals inequities in accessibility that engineers must address.
Although there are several ethical challenges associated with cloud technology, further improvements can ensure its ethical practice. For instance, engineers should develop more secure cloud solutions and urge cloud service providers to adopt more robust security measures to relieve data security issues. Engineers should also aim to make cloud-computing infrastructure more energy efficient in order to minimize greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, engineers can urge policymakers to establish regulations that balance cloud computing innovation with equitable access for all. Humanity can adopt ethical cloud computing practices by solving these issues, unlocking its vast potential to drive economic growth and technological innovations.
By Mo Jiang, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California
About the Author
At the time of writing this, Maohe ‘Mo’ Jiang was a driven Freshman studying Computer Science and Mathematics. He contributed to research focused on AI under the Center in AI for Society Student Branch. He has done projects on multimodal hate speech detection using large language models and has five years of experience tutoring students in STEM-related subjects.
Links for Further Reading
Ethics and Cloud Computing
More on the particular data privacy ethical concerns in the cloud
Top Threats to Cloud Computing 2024
The specific security risks imposed by the cloud computing, by Cloud Security Alliance
The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud MIT’s discussion on the environmental impacts of cloud computing
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