Book 2 - Chapter 8.1 - Consequences of uses of Computing Flashcards
What is a moral action? What is an immoral action?
A moral action is one that is right. An immoral action is one that is wrong.
What is morality?
Morality is primarily about making correct choices between right and wrong, or between good and bad behaviour.
What is ethics?
Ethics is a framework or set of principles. Also known as an ethical theory.
Explain “Asymmetry of power”
Computers can carry out instructions as requested (eg searching for something on the internet), but also store and report information about your actions (eg reporting on what search terms you’ve entered for the last month). People have much less control over the second type of action - this is asymmetry of power.
What is Knowledge?
Knowledge is usable information
What is Information?
Something which is represented by Data.
What is Pervasive Surveillance?
Capturing small data from individuals’ online actions as they go about their daily lives. These data flows have been labelled “data exhaust” - they are the byproduct of users’ actions.
What is Personal Data?
Data about any living person.
What is Machine Learning?
The science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. This creates patterns and links between data, which will be discovered by the computer programme after it has been “trained” on a sample dataset. For example: self-driving cars, prediction of weather patterns, prediction of disease outbreaks, prediction of stock market share prices.
Give an example of the Linking of Information?
Two pieces of information about a person might individually be harmless but combined may be so.
eg:
Tony Blair was a British prime minister.
His home in London was visible in Google Street View.
(The two pieces of info together could be a security risk).
Therefore Google had to blur his home to reduce the risk of harm.
What is Hyperscale Computing?
The ability for a computer architecture to scale (grow bigger or smaller) appropriately and quickly in a cost-effective way, in response to the demand on the computer system. Example platforms: Microsoft Azure, or Amazon Web Services.
What kind of ethical problems can be caused by the low cost of computing at scale?
A video shared on YouTube can go viral around the world in very little time, meaning the subject or owner of the video loses control of it and their privacy.
What is a cookie?
Cookies are small files of data that are used to tell a website or app that a particular visitor to the website has returned. They can be used to improve the user’s experience of the site (by remembering their settings, or their favourite page, or shopping basket). However they can also be used by tracking a person’s activity across multiple websites to then offer advertisements for targetted products.
