HookThe gadget in your pocket ends its life on a scrapyard in Ghana
On the edge of Accra, the capital of Ghana, sits a district called Agbogbloshie — for years one of the largest electronic-waste dumps on Earth. Discarded laptops, phones and televisions from Europe and North America arrived here by the container-load, and young men burned the plastic casings over open fires to get at the few pounds' worth of copper and gold inside, breathing lead, mercury and cadmium fumes into their lungs and the soil. The device you are reading this on was designed, in part, by decisions made thousands of miles away about whether it could be repaired, upgraded or recycled — and those decisions are exactly what section 1.6 asks you to weigh up. Computer science is never only a technical subject; every system has consequences for people and the planet.
OCR breaks those consequences into five impacts — ethical, legal, cultural, environmental and privacy — and pairs them with the four pieces of UK legislation that try to keep the technology in check. The skill being tested is not memorising definitions; it is judgement. You are expected to look at a scenario — a facial-recognition trial, a company selling customer data, a new phone that cannot be repaired — and argue both the benefits and the harms across those categories, then reach a reasoned conclusion. A one-sided answer ("technology is bad for the environment") earns little; a balanced one that names who gains, who loses and which law applies earns the top marks.
ModelThe five impacts — the lens you argue through
Each impact is a different question to ask of a technology. Ethical impacts are about right and wrong even where nothing is illegal: is it acceptable for an algorithm to decide who gets a loan, or for a factory to automate away hundreds of jobs? Legal impacts are about what the law actually permits and forbids — the four Acts below. Cultural impacts are about how technology changes the way groups of people live: social media reshaping how teenagers form friendships, or the digital divide between those with fast internet and devices and those without. During the 2020 school closures, hundreds of thousands of UK pupils had no laptop or reliable broadband at home, and fell behind through no fault of their own — a cultural and social impact with lasting consequences.
Environmental impacts cover the physical cost of computing: the energy data centres and cryptocurrency mining consume, the raw materials (rare-earth metals, cobalt, lithium) dug out to build devices, and the e-waste they become, like Agbogbloshie. Privacy impacts are about who can see your data and what they do with it — location tracking, targeted advertising, and mass data collection. The exam reflex you need is to run a scenario through all five lenses and notice that most technologies are positive on some and negative on others.
Put one technology through all five lenses: a supermarket's facial-recognition system that spots known shoplifters. Ethical — is it fair to scan every innocent shopper's face to catch a few, and what if the system misidentifies people of some ethnicities more often? Legal — the faces are personal data, so the Data Protection Act 2018 governs how they are collected and stored. Cultural — it may make some communities feel watched and unwelcome, changing who shops there. Environmental — the cameras and servers draw continuous power. Privacy — customers are being biometrically tracked, usually without meaningful consent. One technology, five different verdicts — and a good 8-mark answer surfaces several of them rather than repeating one.
DataThe environmental bill computing quietly runs up
It is tempting to think of software as weightless, but every click has a physical cost. The world's data centres — the warehouses of servers behind streaming, search and cloud storage — are estimated to consume in the region of 1 to 1.5% of all the electricity used on the planet, and that share is rising as artificial-intelligence workloads grow. Cryptocurrency mining is a striking example of the same problem: the Bitcoin network alone is estimated to use electricity on the scale of a mid-sized country's entire annual consumption, because its security depends on vast numbers of computers racing to solve pointless puzzles.
The manufacturing end is just as costly. A single smartphone contains dozens of elements, including rare-earth metals and cobalt mined in conditions that raise serious ethical questions, and most of a device's lifetime carbon footprint is emitted before it is ever switched on. At the disposal end comes e-waste: the UN has estimated the world generates over 50 million tonnes of it a year, much of it exported to places like Agbogbloshie rather than safely recycled. The counter-argument matters for balance, though — the same technologies enable remote working that cuts commuting, smart grids that save energy, and video calls that replace flights. OCR wants both sides.
Reason about a real trade-off: is streaming a film "greener" than buying the DVD? On one hand, streaming avoids manufacturing a plastic disc, printing a case and shipping it to a shop — real material and transport savings. On the other, streaming in high definition pulls the film from a data centre that is powered around the clock, across network equipment that also draws power, every single time anyone watches. The honest answer is it depends: watching once favours streaming, but streaming the same film in 4K many times can consume more energy than the one-off cost of a disc. That "it depends, and here is what it depends on" structure is exactly the analytical move (AO3) the environmental questions reward.
CasePrivacy and the law that guards personal data
The first of the four Acts is the Data Protection Act 2018, which brings the EU's GDPR into UK law and governs how organisations handle personal data — any information that can identify a living person. It sets out principles the exam expects you to know the spirit of: data must be collected lawfully and for a specific stated purpose, kept accurate and secure, held no longer than necessary, and not used for anything beyond what the person was told. People also gain rights — to see the data held about them and to have it corrected or, in many cases, erased.
Why it has teeth: in 2018 the Information Commissioner's Office fined Facebook £500,000 — the maximum then available — over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the personal data of up to 87 million users was harvested via a quiz app and used for political profiling without proper consent. Under the newer 2018 Act the fines are far larger, reaching tens of millions of pounds, because they scale with a company's global turnover. The privacy impact and the legal impact are two faces of the same coin: the law exists precisely because unregulated data collection caused real harm.
Apply the Act to a scenario. A gym collects members' names, addresses and health details to manage memberships — a lawful, specified purpose, so that is fine. The gym then sells that member list to a supplements company for marketing, without asking members. That breaches the Data Protection Act 2018 on two counts a student should name: the data is being used for a purpose the members were never told about, and it is being shared without consent. The members have the right to complain to the ICO, which can investigate and fine the gym. The mark comes from tying the specific breach to the specific principle, not just writing "they broke the data protection law."
CaseMisuse, copyright, and the licences that set the rules
The Computer Misuse Act 1990 targets hacking. It created three offences: (1) unauthorised access to computer material; (2) unauthorised access with intent to commit a further offence, such as fraud; and (3) unauthorised acts intended to impair a computer, such as spreading malware or launching a denial-of-service attack. It is the law under which the teenager behind the 2015 TalkTalk hack was prosecuted. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 protects creative and intellectual work — software, music, films, images, writing — making it illegal to copy, distribute or use it without permission; illegally downloading a film or using cracked software both breach it.
The fourth topic is software licences, which are how copyright is granted in practice. Proprietary (closed-source) software, such as Microsoft Windows or Adobe Photoshop, keeps its source code secret; you buy a licence to use it under strict conditions but cannot see or change how it works. Open-source software, such as the Linux operating system or the Firefox browser, publishes its source code and licenses users to view, modify and redistribute it freely. Neither is simply "better": proprietary software typically offers professional support and polish for a fee, while open-source offers freedom, transparency and no licence cost but may rely on community support. Matching the licence to the user's needs is the judgement OCR tests.
Classify a break-in under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. An office worker guesses a colleague's weak password and logs into their account to read private emails — that alone is offence (1), unauthorised access. While in there, they change a figure in the payroll spreadsheet to inflate their own pay — that is offence (3), an unauthorised act intended to impair or alter data, and because it was done to commit fraud it also engages offence (2), access with intent to commit a further offence. One sequence of actions, three distinct offences under one Act. Being able to map each action to the specific offence — rather than just saying "they broke the Computer Misuse Act" — is what separates a top-level answer from a vague one.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
This is the most AO3-heavy section of OCR J277 Component 01: the impacts material is the natural home of the 8-mark extended-response questions, marked on levels of response. The examiners are explicit that a list of points, however many, cannot reach the top level — you must analyse and reach a justified conclusion. The reliable structure is to argue both sides across the relevant impact categories (ethical, legal, cultural, environmental, privacy), then decide: "on balance the trial should go ahead, but only with these safeguards, because the privacy risk outweighs the security gain unless data is deleted after 30 days." A conclusion that follows from your own argument is the single most-dropped mark.
For AO1 and AO2, precision about the four Acts wins marks that vague answers lose. Name the correct Act for the scenario — hacking is the Computer Misuse Act 1990, misusing personal data is the Data Protection Act 2018, copying software or media is the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 — and, better still, name the specific principle or offence breached, as in the worked examples above. Know the proprietary-versus-open-source comparison as a two-sided argument, not a slogan, and be ready to recommend one for a stated user. Two quick wins: always give both a benefit and a drawback rather than only the negative that first comes to mind, and anchor a claim in a real example (Agbogbloshie for e-waste, Cambridge Analytica for privacy) — concrete evidence lifts an answer from assertion to analysis.