6.3 Data ethics — legal vs. ethical and responsibility

Legal is not the same as ethical

Something can be perfectly legal and still be unethical. Following the law is a minimum, not a guarantee of doing the right thing. On the exam, an answer that defends a practice only because it is 'legal' or 'allowed by the terms of service' is almost always wrong — the exam never treats legal and ethical as the same thing.

Respecting others' work

Intellectual property means respecting the work of others. Copyright protects original works; open-source software makes its source code publicly available under a license; Creative Commons licenses allow sharing under stated conditions; and passing off someone else's work as your own is plagiarism. When you reuse code or content, stay within its license and give credit.

Transparency, access, and responsibility

Transparency: people should be able to understand how a program makes decisions that affect them — avoid unexplainable 'black boxes' for high-stakes choices. The digital divide is the gap between those who benefit from computing and those left out, which creates inequity. Above all, responsible computing means programmers have duties beyond making code work: consider who could be affected, and how.