This mini-lesson covers OCR 1.5 — Legal, moral, cultural and ethical issues. Vague opinion earns nothing here. 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.
| Type | The question it asks | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Legal | Does it break a law? | Accessing a system without authorisation |
| Moral | Is it right or wrong by an individual's values? | Reading a colleague's private messages |
| Ethical | Does it meet a professional code of conduct? | Shipping a model you know is biased |
| Cultural | How does it change how a society lives? | Social media reshaping political debate |
The key insight: legal and moral are independent. Selling users' browsing histories may be entirely legal and still wrong. An answer that treats "legal" and "right" as synonyms cannot reach the top band.
Passed because existing law simply did not cover unauthorised access to a computer. It creates offences of unauthorised action:
| Section | Offence | Maximum |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Unauthorised access to computer material | 2 years |
| 2 | Unauthorised access with intent to commit a further offence | 5 years |
| 3 | Unauthorised acts impairing a computer (malware, denial of service) | 10 years |
| 3A | Making or supplying tools to commit these offences | 2 years |
The word the whole Act turns on is "unauthorised". A penetration tester running the identical attack with written permission commits no offence at all. The technique is not the crime; the missing authorisation is. And section 1 needs no damage whatsoever — merely looking is enough.
The Data Protection Act 2018 (with UK GDPR) governs personal data. Data must be processed lawfully and fairly, collected for specified purposes, be adequate and limited to what is necessary, be accurate, be kept no longer than needed, and be held securely. Data subjects have rights to be informed, of access, to rectification and to erasure. The ICO can fine up to 4% of global annual turnover, and a breach must be reported within 72 hours.
The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 protects original creative works — including source code, music, images and text — automatically, with no registration. It is breached by copying, distributing or adapting a work without permission. Open source licences do not abandon copyright: they use it, granting specific permissions on specific conditions.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 governs state surveillance: interception of communications, access to communications data, and the power to demand decryption keys.
The exam-ready argument on encryption backdoors: a backdoor that lets the state read a criminal's messages exists in everyone's device. Mathematics cannot distinguish a police officer from a criminal — there is no vulnerability that only the good guys can use.
A model trained on historical data learns the patterns in that history — including its injustices. This is algorithmic bias, and it is not a coding error. It is the data, faithfully reproduced.
What makes it uniquely dangerous: the model is opaque, it acts at enormous scale, and its output carries a false air of mathematical objectivity. A biased human harms dozens; a biased model harms millions and is believed.
The law's answer: 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 for disparate impact before deployment — not after the harm is done.
| Opportunity | Risk |
|---|---|
| Dangerous and repetitive work is removed from humans | Structural unemployment — jobs vanish faster than people can retrain |
| Productivity rises and goods get cheaper | Gains flow to capital owners, widening inequality |
| New categories of work appear | They need different skills, often in different places |
Offshoring moves work to lower-cost countries — cheaper for the firm, damaging for the local workforce, and raising questions about the conditions in which the work is then done.
Environmental effects: data centres consume a large and growing share of global electricity; rapid hardware turnover produces e-waste containing lead, mercury and cadmium, frequently exported to countries with the weakest protections. Against that: computing enables remote working, smart grids, precision agriculture and climate modelling.
Censorship and monopolies: a handful of platforms now decide what billions of people see. Filtering protects children and blocks extremism; it also lets a government suppress dissent, and a monopoly stifle competition and harvest data unchallenged. The digital divide — by income, geography, age and disability — turns into outright exclusion once essential services move online.
Being legal is the floor, not the ceiling. Professional bodies such as the BCS (the Chartered Institute for IT) publish codes of conduct that require members to:
Why this earns marks: an exam question asking whether a developer "should" deploy a system they suspect is biased is not asking about the law. The answer is a professional-ethics answer: the duty to the public outranks the duty to the employer, and a competent professional raises the concern rather than shipping quietly.
Censorship and filtering cut both ways, and a good answer says so. Filtering blocks child abuse imagery and terrorist recruitment; the identical machinery lets a state suppress dissent and rewrite what its citizens can know. The technology is neutral; the question is always who controls it and who holds them to account.
Monopolies: a handful of platforms now mediate what billions of people read, buy and believe. That concentration brings efficiency and free services — and it also means one company's ranking change can destroy an industry, competitors cannot get a foothold, and personal data is harvested at a scale no individual can meaningfully consent to.
The digital divide — by income, geography, age and disability — stops being about convenience the moment essential services move online. Banking, benefits, GP appointments and schoolwork all now assume an internet connection and the confidence to use it.
How to argue this in an exam: name the stakeholders (users, the company, the state, the excluded), give the opportunity and the risk for each, and only then reach a conclusion. Two-sided argument is what the mark scheme rewards; unsupported opinion is what it ignores.
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 · fines up to 4% of global turnover · 72-hour breach report
Copyright 1988 & RIPA 2000: source code is protected automatically · RIPA governs state surveillance and decryption demands
AI & bias: models learn historical injustice, at scale, opaquely, with a false air of objectivity — audit before deployment
Society: structural unemployment · offshoring · e-waste and data-centre energy · censorship, monopolies and the digital divide
That is the whole of OCR 1.5. Press Finish to see your score.
You've worked through Legal, moral, cultural & ethical issues for OCR A-level Computer Science (H446). 🎉
Your stars: 0 / 0
Next: test yourself in the Evaluate stage Confidence Quiz, then lock it in with Verify.