Legal & Ethical Concerns
- Explain intellectual property, copyright, and open-source licensing
- Distinguish legal from ethical questions in computing
- Describe privacy trade-offs of collecting and combining personal data
Owning and sharing creative work
Software, music, images, and writing are intellectual property, and copyright automatically grants their creator control over how the work is copied and used. Using others’ material generally requires permission or a license. Creative Commons and open-source licenses let creators deliberately grant broad reuse rights while keeping some conditions — for example, requiring attribution (credit) or that derivative works stay open. Respecting these terms is both a legal requirement and a matter of giving credit; ignoring them is plagiarism or infringement.
Legal is not the same as ethical
A legal question asks what the law permits; an ethical question asks what is right. The two often overlap but are not identical: some actions are legal yet ethically troubling (quietly selling users’ browsing data buried in a terms-of-service agreement), and technology frequently moves faster than laws can. Because a company can legally collect certain data does not settle whether it should. Good computing practice weighs both — following the law and considering the human impact on people who did not fully consent.
Privacy in a data-rich world
Computing enables collecting vast personal data — searches, locations, purchases, messages — often as an invisible byproduct of using a service. This creates a privacy trade-off: the data powers useful features (recommendations, maps) but also exposes people to surveillance, profiling, and harm if leaked or misused. A particular danger is aggregation: separate, seemingly harmless pieces of data can be combined to reveal something private, even re-identifying a person who believed they were anonymous. Protecting privacy means limiting collection, securing data, and being transparent about its use.
An app collects each user’s location "only to show nearby restaurants," but also stores and later sells the complete location history. Analyze the legal and ethical dimensions.
- 1.Legal dimension: if a buried terms-of-service clause technically permits the sale, the practice may be legal.
- 2.Ethical dimension: users did not meaningfully understand or consent to selling their movement history, so it violates their reasonable expectation of privacy.
- 3.Privacy risk from aggregation: a full location history can reveal home, workplace, religion, and health visits — private facts assembled from individually mundane points.
- 4.Better practice: collect only what the feature needs, be transparent, obtain genuine consent, and avoid combining data in ways users would object to.
A developer uses a photo released under a Creative Commons license that requires attribution, but posts it with no credit to the creator. What is the problem?
Open and Creative Commons licenses grant reuse with conditions — most commonly attribution. "Free to use" is not "free to use however you want": you must follow the license terms, or it is infringement.
Which statement best captures the relationship between legal and ethical concerns in computing?
Beware of data aggregation: combining separate, innocuous pieces of personal data can reveal private facts and re-identify people. And remember that "legal" never automatically means "ethical" — the exam rewards recognizing both dimensions.
Answer the 2 checkpoints as you read.
Sign in to save your progress