Impact of Program Design & Ethical and Social Issues Around Data Collection

some ethical stuff that ap computer science a asks about on the exam (for some reason)

System Reliability

The ability of a program to perform tasks understand conditions without failure. Programmers must maximize this by testing their program in varying conditions.

Impacts of a Program

Societal, economic, and cultural effects of a program can be both beneficial and harmful. Sometimes, a program made to solve a particular problem also has unintended bad effects beyond its use.

Legal Issues with Programs

Certain legal issues, such as intellectual property concerns, arise when creating programs. It is important that programmers make evident who can use their code.

Open Source Code

Code published in such a way where other programmers can freely integrate it into their own programs. If code is not open source, the programmers who seek to reuse it need permission, and sometimes to pay a fee, from the original programmer.

Privacy and Data Collection

When programs collect personal data about users, it is crucial that the data used is protected, as to not release this data to unauthorized people and bring about harmful effects. Both legally and ethically, programmers must be transparent about how they collect data, the limitations of their programs, and they must also inform impacted users if a data breach occurs. Safeguarding the personal privacy of users must be a priority for programmers.

Algorithmic Bias

Systematic and repeated errors in a program that can create unfair outcomes for specific groups of users. Programmers must watch out for this, and before using data to extrapolate information or draw conclusions, they must be aware of the data set collection method used by the program and its potential to have biases.

Inefficient Programs

Sometimes, data sets contain incomplete/inaccurate data, or are related to a specific topic that may not be appropriate to use in a program about a different topic. Using such data sets can lead to the program resulting in incorrect outcomes, something programmers must be aware of.