Social Issues of Big Data and Cloud: Privacy, Confidentiality, and Public Utility

Business people and academia are now excited about Big Data and Cloud Computing as the new and most innovative means for enhancing productivity and customer satisfaction. Simultaneously, there are strong concerns about privacy not only among privacy advocates but among consumers in general, and how to strike a right balance is the main theme in every field of science. However, it is quite strange that very little attention has been paid to the concept of confidentiality, which must be the core element of privacy. This paper first tries to analyze the following two dichotomies as a basis for possible policy considerations: (1) privacy approach in the United States versus confidentiality approach in the United Kingdom, though they share the same common law tradition, and (2) clear demarcation between Information Service and Telecommunications in the United States, dating back to the Computer Inquiry in the 1970s. This paper also analyzes the features of the Cloud and discusses the possibility of treating it as a new type of Public Utility, namely Information Utility. This hypothesis should be rejected, because there are crucial differences in market structures, regardless of clear similarities in service features. Instead, this paper emphasizes the necessity of protecting confidentiality as an industrial norm. Taking into account the long tradition of free market for computing industries, self-regulation is basically preferable to government regulation. But from a different viewpoint of "nudge", a hybrid combination of libertarianism and paternalism, this paper concludes by proposing five short recommendations including fair contract terms as well as unbundling confidentiality from privacy.