1.6 - Ethical, legal, cultural, and environmental impact

Impacts of digital technology in wider society

- Technology introduces ethical, legal, cultural, environmental, and privacy issues.

Ethical and Legal issues

- An ethical issue is a problem that raises questions about the morality of an action or decision. Is it right to do something? Is it wrong to do something?
- As technology advances, it becomes increasingly important to consider ethical questions behind what is going on.
- People can have very different opinions about what is right and wrong, as ethics takes into account your moral values.
- What is right and wrong legally does not always match what is right and wrong ethically. As laws often fail to keep up with technology, third parties often have to step in with moderation, and old laws can restrict what you should be able to do.

Cybercrime

- Cybercrime is the illegal use of computers and the internet to commit crimes.
- Cybercrime can be committed for personal gain, to cause harm, or to protect someone else's property.
- It can disproportionately affect groups without proper education, who may not be aware of how to protect themselves.

Privacy

- Privacy can be compromised by companies, governments, and other organisations.
- Again education is important to protect your privacy, but 'private' solutions also often cost more money as the company cannot use your data for selling you things (through ads).

Intellectual property rights

- Intellectual property rights are the legal rights to the creation of something, such as a book, movie, or software.
- Intellectual property rights can be used to protect the creators of the work, and to prevent others from using it without permission.
- The ease of simply copy+pasting a file or sending someone a download link causes copyright issues and raises questions about to what extent you can send your friends ebooks, for example, just how you would've lent a book in real life.
- Digital piracy can lead to revenue loss for the creators of the work. When you pirate, you are not paying the original creator for the work.
- Despite this, many companies use predatory practices to get money from their customers, so pirating may be the only option to avoid paying huge amounts of money you simply don't have.
- As the creator of the game ULTRAKILL said in a response to a tweet about pirating said game, "Culture should not only be available to those who can afford it".

Cultural impact

- Culture is the way people think, feel, and behave.
- Culture can be a source of conflict, as it can be used to divide people into groups, however this can also create a sense of belonging.
- Technology has become increasingly important to culture, for example online shopping, gaming, social media, and remote work.

Digital divide

- The digital divide is the gap between those who have access to technology and those who do not.
- The digital divide can be caused by a lack of access to technology, or by a lack of access to education.
- As above, "Culture should not only be available to those who can afford it".

Employment

- Lack of access to technology can lead to a lack of employment opportunities, as people may not be able to find a job online, and as you may now have to apply to 50+ places to find a job, the lack of ability to send an application via emails can be a huge hindrance.
- Technology has also caused issues with boundaries, as it has led to a culture of being on call 24/7, and people may not be able to take time off to care for their family.
- However, remote work leads to a lot more freedom, as you can work from anywhere, and inclusion, as you don't have to pay huge rents to work for a company based in an expensive city.

Control by hostile foreign powers

- Culture can be influenced by hostile foreign powers, as they can use propaganda can use social media to spread propaganda and disinformation.
- For example, there is a lot of proof that the Russian government has been trying to spread misinformation to get Donald Trump into power (who has policies that favour them, such as wanting to cut support to Ukraine).

Environmental issues

- The manufacturing and use of computers has a negative impact on the environment due to energy and natural resource usage.
- Over time we deplete resources more and more and grow technology's impact.

Energy

- Manufacturing and use of computers uses a lot of energy, and this can lead to more and more fossil fuels being used, polluting the environment.
- Data centres especially have huge power requirements, which now account for over 1% of global electricity consumption.^{Source: IEA}

Natural resource usage

- Computers often use rare, precious, and finite resources, such as rare earth metals, plastics, and fossil fuels in the distribution.

E-Waste

- E-waste is the waste of electronic devices, such as computers, phones, and TVs.
- When not recycled properly, the ever growing pile of e-waste can lead to huge amounts of pollution.

Privacy issues

- Privacy is the right to control the information that is collected about you.
- It is an issue because large organisations often collect huge amount of data about you without your knowledge or consent (looking at you, Google).
- Control over data is important and the ever growing amount of data being collected raises lots of questions and concerns as technology becomes more and more prevalent.

Search Engines

- Search engines are a major source of privacy issues, as they collect a lot of data about you, and they can be used to track you.
- While most sane search engines (e.g. Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search) do not track you, some other engines do (e.g. Google, Bing).
- Those that track you use the information to serve you ads, and to build up profiles of you, with almost everything you might be thinking of buying, and your interests.
- If you searched up 'things to do in London', and the search engine used your location to show you results (lets say you live in Warsaw), you would likely get ads for plane tickets from Warsaw Chopin Airport to London Heathrow Airport.
- The profiles can also be abused by authorities and sometimes companies are forced to turn in lots of information about you to law enforcement, which can be a problem if you don't trust your government or are under a hostile government (e.g. China, North Korea, but even places like Turkey to some extent).

Internet Monitoring

- Most schools will use extremely invasive tracking software to track you, and a lot of them (e.g. Lightspeed Filter Agent, which pretends to only be a website blocker), collects your PHYSICAL LOCATION, among a lot of other personal information about you.
- This becomes a problem but you quite literally CANNOT opt out of this, and causes groups of people to go pretty far to avoid being tracked, which is honestly fair, however this then removes all protections that the school have put in place.
^{can you tell that i f*cking hate lightspeed filter?}

Website "analytics"

- Lots of websites use analytics to gain insights into how you use their website, and what you like and dislike about it.
- This isn't a necessarily a huge issue, but lots of analytics companies (e.g. Google Analytics, Hotjar, Facebook Pixel) collect a lot more imformation about you than they need to, for example tracking where your mouse is 100% of the time so they can tell whether you liked an ad, clicked on it, or ignored it.
- This again contributes to building up a profile of you, especially when the same analytics company is used by many websites.

Legislation in CS

Data Protection Act 2018

The Data Protection Act 2018 is a law that governs how personal data must be handled and protected. It aligns with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which is applied across the European Union. The key points are:

1. Key Principles of Data Protection

• Lawfulness, Fairness, and Transparency: Data must be processed lawfully, fairly, and in a transparent manner.
• Purpose Limitation: Data should be collected for specified, explicit, and legitimate purposes, and not used for any other purpose.
• Data Minimisation: Only the data necessary for the specified purpose should be collected.
• Accuracy: Personal data must be accurate and kept up to date.
• Storage Limitation: Data should be kept only as long as necessary for the purpose it was collected.
• Integrity and Confidentiality: Data must be handled in a way that ensures appropriate security, including protection against unauthorised access or loss.

2. Rights of Individuals

• Right to be Informed: Individuals have the right to know how their data is being used.
• Right of Access: People can request access to their personal data.
• Right to Rectification: Individuals can have incorrect data corrected.
• Right to Erasure: Also known as the "right to be forgotten," individuals can request their data to be deleted.
• Right to Restrict Processing: Individuals can request the restriction of their data processing.
• Right to Data Portability: People can obtain and reuse their personal data for their own purposes.
• Right to Object: Individuals can object to their data being used in certain ways.
• Rights related to automated decision-making and profiling: Individuals have rights around not being subject to decisions made without human involvement.

3. Responsibilities of Organisations

• Organisations must have a legal basis for collecting and using personal data.
• They need to implement appropriate security measures to protect data.
• Data breaches must be reported to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) within 72 hours.
• Organisations should appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO) if they process large amounts of sensitive data.

4. Enforcement and Penalties

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is responsible for enforcing the Data Protection Act 2018. Organisations that fail to comply with the law can face significant fines, up to £17.5 million or 4% of their annual global turnover, whichever is higher.
Note that 4% of turnover is a HUGE amount for a business, being 4% of ALL the money it brings in. Not makes as profit, brings in BEFORE expenses.

Sidenote: GDPR is the law that makes cookie banners a thing. Always reject them, btw.

The Computer Misuse Act 1990

- The Computer Misuse Act (CMA) is mainly focused on the malicious use of computers.
- Its primary purpose was to make sure that hacking was covered by the law.
- It has received many updates over time.

Offences under the CMA

• 1. Unauthorised access to a computer. For example, guessing someone's phone password.
• 2. Unauthorised access with intent to commit further offences. For example, guessing someone's password to their Amazon account with intent to find their address and dox them.
• 3. Unauthorised modification of files. For example, encrypting someone else's files and making them pay for the decryption key.

Copyright Designs & Patents Act 1988

- This law governs copyright and patents, (wow) a type of intellectual property.
- It makes it illegal to copy, modify or distributed copyrighted material without permission.
- Original works have copyright automatically protected, and the copyright does not expire until 25-70 years after the death of the author.
- The reason this is SO long, is that entities like book publishers, essentially, are greedy and want to make as much money as possible from the copyrighted material.
- If your copyright has been infringed upon, you may take action under the act.
- Digital piracy is illegal under this act, including P2P file sharing (which is a lot harder to take action against due to its distributed nature).

Offences under the CDPA

Software Licences

- A software licence is a legal agreemment that says what you can do with the software, and what you can't.
- It is a contract between the creator of the software and the user of the software.
- There are two main types of licence: open source and proprietary.

Advantages and disadvantages

Sidenote: Generally, if you are looking for a piece of software and all else is equal, go for the FOSS one.
More info: fsf.org.