Impact of Computing

Computing innovations can have both good and bad effects, and something that helps one group can harm another. Effects aren't always intended: people use innovations in ways their creators never planned, and the speed at which information spreads online can make both the good and the bad effects bigger.

The digital divide is the gap between people who have access to computing devices and the internet and people who don't, shaped by things like income, where you live and age. It exists between countries and within communities, and the choices of individuals, organizations and governments can make it wider or narrower.

Programs can carry the same biases people have, either because the bias is written into the algorithm or because it's in the data the program uses, like a hiring tool trained on past decisions that favored one group. Programmers can reduce bias by testing with varied data and users and checking how their program treats different groups.

Crowdsourcing means getting ideas, information, work or money from a large number of people over the internet. Citizen science is research where lots of people, many of them not scientists, collect or analyze data with their own devices, and open access to data and tools lets people work together on problems in new ways.

Work you create is your intellectual property, and copyright protects it, but digital files are so easy to copy that protecting them is hard. Creative Commons licenses, open source software and open access let creators share their work on clear terms, while using someone else's work without permission, or passing it off as your own (plagiarism), raises legal and ethical problems.

Personally identifiable information (PII), like your name, address or birthday, can be collected and combined to identify you, so protect it with strong passwords, multifactor authentication and encryption (symmetric encryption uses one key; public key encryption uses a public key to lock and a private key to unlock). Watch out for phishing messages that trick you into giving up information, malware such as viruses and keyloggers, and rogue access points that can intercept your data.