Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru

You stated in the thread title that this is a question of business ethics, not business law.

Legally, you might have the right to delete them. It depends on the conditions of the documents' creation and any or all agreements with the company to which the documents pertain. It also depends on any or all input the others may have had to the documents in question. I don't really know about the laws regulating these things.

Ethically, you shouldn't delete them if others use them as resources to help them do their jobs. You should never burn your bridges in business because you never know who might hire you or give you a reference down the road. Hindering others from doing their job is never the right thing to do unless there is a legal or moral issue at stake. Deleting documents out of spite, I would say, is generally unethical.

Originally Posted by The_Jazz

Legally, I have no idea.

Ethically, it would be wrong. And it's pretty clearly wrong. And I think you know that.

However, if there are no backups of these files, you are under no obligation to share them with your former employer, assuming that they are entirely your work and that they knew where they were hosted. If you created them while entirely as function of your job but they chose to allow you to host them in a place where they cannot access them, you could ethically (note, still not talking legally) ask for compensation for transfering the files back to your former employer. Because it would be work related at a job you no longer have. Just like if you had a deposition for a former employer, you would also be compensated.

Knowing more of the actual situation would clear some of these issues up, but it would also be enitrely understandable if you chose not to share.