Ethical, legal and environmental impacts
Computer Science · GCSE · The School
Examiners award marks for keeping them apart. A LEGAL question asks what an Act permits or forbids, and has an answer you can look up. An ETHICAL question asks what someone ought to do when the law is silent or permissive, and has no single answer, only reasons. An ENVIRONMENTAL question asks what the decision costs in energy, materials and disposal. Facial recognition in a shopping centre may be lawful, ethically contested and environmentally trivial all at once, and an answer that runs the three together loses marks it did not need to lose.
The Data Protection Act 2018, which implements UK GDPR, governs personal data: it must be collected for a stated purpose, kept no longer than needed, and shown to the person on request. The Computer Misuse Act 1990 makes unauthorised ACCESS an offence in itself, whether or not anything is taken or damaged. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 covers software, images and music as intellectual property. The Freedom of Information Act 2000 runs the other way, obliging public bodies to disclose. Candidates routinely cite the wrong one, and the commonest error is answering a hacking question with data protection.
Computing hardware carries an energy cost in manufacture, an energy cost in use, and a disposal problem at the end. Data centres consume electricity continuously for cooling as well as computation. Devices are replaced long before they fail, and electronic waste contains both valuable metals and genuinely toxic ones. None of that appears on the screen, which is precisely why an examiner asks about it: the question tests whether you can reason about a cost you cannot see from where you are sitting.
A school proposes facial recognition to speed up lunch queues. A weak answer states that it is bad for privacy and stops. A strong answer holds both sides with a cost attached to each. FOR: queues move faster, no card can be lost or lent, and attendance is recorded automatically. AGAINST: biometric data is irreplaceable, because a compromised password can be changed and a compromised face cannot; the Data Protection Act requires explicit consent for biometrics and a school cannot obtain freely given consent from a pupil who must eat; and error rates are documented as higher for some groups than others, so the burden of failure falls unequally. Then judge, and say what would change your judgement — perhaps that a card system already solves the queue at a fraction of the risk. That final move, naming what would change your mind, is what separates the top band from a list.