This mini-lesson covers AQA 4.8 — Consequences of uses of computing. It is worth real marks and is the section most often answered badly, because vague opinion earns nothing. Name the Act, name the stakeholder, and argue both sides.
Work through each screen, answer the questions as you go (some are recall, some are calculations you must actually work out) and collect ⭐ stars. Press Start when you're ready.
The examiner is testing whether you can tell these apart. Use the right word.
| Type | Question it asks | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Legal | Does it break a law? | Accessing a system without authorisation (Computer Misuse Act) |
| Moral | Is it right or wrong by an individual's values? | Reading a partner's messages without asking |
| Ethical | Does it meet a professional code of conduct? | A BCS member deploying a model they know is biased |
| Cultural | How does it change how a society lives? | Social media reshaping political discourse |
The key insight: legal and moral are independent. Selling users' browsing data may be perfectly legal and still be wrong. Whistleblowing may be illegal and still be right. An answer that treats "legal" and "right" as the same word cannot reach the top band.
Passed after hackers broke into Prince Philip's Prestel mailbox and the courts found that no existing law covered it. It creates offences of unauthorised action:
| Section | Offence | Maximum sentence |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Unauthorised access to computer material | 2 years |
| 2 | Unauthorised access with intent to commit a further offence | 5 years |
| 3 | Unauthorised acts impairing the operation of a computer (e.g. malware, DoS) | 10 years |
| 3A | Making or supplying tools to commit these offences | 2 years |
The word that decides every case is "unauthorised". A penetration tester running the identical attack with written permission commits no offence. The technique is not the crime — the lack of authorisation is. Note also that section 1 requires no damage at all: merely looking is enough.
Governs the processing of personal data — any information from which a living individual can be identified. Its principles: data must be
Rights of the data subject include the right to be informed, of access (a subject access request), to rectification, to erasure ("to be forgotten"), and not to be subject to purely automated decision-making with legal effects.
Enforcement: the ICO can fine up to 4% of global annual turnover or £17.5 million, whichever is higher. A personal data breach must be reported to the ICO within 72 hours.
The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 protects original creative works — including source code, images, music, film and text — automatically, with no need to register. It is infringed by copying, distributing or adapting a work without the owner's permission.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) governs state surveillance: interception of communications, access to communications data, and the power to demand decryption keys. It exists to make surveillance lawful and accountable — and it is the constant battleground between security and privacy.
The exam-ready argument on encryption backdoors: a backdoor that lets the state read a criminal's messages is a backdoor that exists in everyone's device — and mathematics cannot tell a police officer from a criminal. There is no such thing as a vulnerability only good people can use.
An algorithm trained on historical data learns the patterns in that history — including its injustices. This is algorithmic bias, and it is not a bug in the code. It is the data faithfully reproduced.
The specific harms: the model is opaque (nobody can explain a single decision), it operates at enormous scale, and its output carries a false air of mathematical objectivity. A biased human interviewer harms dozens of people; a biased model harms millions and is believed.
The law responds: UK GDPR gives a right not to be subject to a solely automated decision with legal or similarly significant effects, and a right to meaningful information about the logic involved. The professional duty is to audit models for disparate impact before deployment, not after.
Automation is not new — but it now reaches cognitive work: legal discovery, radiology, translation, code generation. Argue it properly, with both sides:
| Opportunity | Risk |
|---|---|
| Dangerous, repetitive work is removed from humans | Structural unemployment — jobs vanish faster than workers can retrain |
| Productivity rises; goods get cheaper | Gains flow to capital owners, widening inequality |
| New categories of work are created | The new jobs need different skills, often in different places |
The digital divide is the gap between those with meaningful access to technology and those without — by income, geography (rural broadband), age and disability. As essential services move online, the divide stops being about convenience and becomes about exclusion from ordinary life: banking, benefits, GP appointments, schoolwork.
Environmental cost: data centres consume a significant and growing share of global electricity, and rapid hardware turnover produces e-waste containing lead, mercury and cadmium — frequently exported to countries with the weakest protections. Include it: it is a legitimate consequence of computing and it is a marking point.
Tap a scenario, then tap the Act it breaches.
Tap an item on the left, then its partner on the right.
Four lenses: legal (law) · moral (right/wrong) · ethical (professional code) · cultural (society) — they can disagree
Computer Misuse Act 1990: s1 access (2 yrs) · s2 with intent (5) · s3 impairment (10) · s3A tools (2) — it all turns on unauthorised
Data Protection Act 2018: six principles · subject rights · ICO fines up to 4% of global turnover · 72-hour breach report
Copyright 1988: protects source code and creative works automatically; open-source licences use copyright, not abandon it
Algorithmic bias: the model learns the injustice in its training data — at scale, opaquely, and with a false air of objectivity
Society: automation and structural unemployment · digital divide → exclusion · data centres and e-waste
That is the whole of AQA 4.8. Press Finish to see your score.
You've worked through Consequences of uses of computing for AQA A-level Computer Science (7517). 🎉
Your stars: 0 / 0
Next: test yourself in the Evaluate stage Confidence Quiz, then lock it in with Verify.