Data protection act
The aim of the data protection act is to protect the personal data that we provide to organisations. Every organisation that holds data must register with the Information
Commissioner’s Office(ICO) and comply with the rules of the data protection act. There are rules about what data firms are allowed to hold and about the rights you have if an
organisation holds your data.
Data collected must be:
- Used fairly and lawfully
- For a specific and stated reason
- Used for the reason it was
gathered
- Accurate and up to date
- Only kept for as long as needed
- Protected against loss, damage and unauthorised access
A data subject is a person about whom data is stored. As a data subject you have the right to:
- Find out how your data is used
- See the data an organisation holds about you
- Have data updated if it is not up to date
- Have data deleted if the organisation no longer needs to have it
- Stop an organisation from processing your data
- Transfer your data to another organisation
Copyrights designs and patents act
The copyrights, designs and patents act protects intellectual property rights e.g. movies, books, games, other software etc. It is illegal to download these from file sharing
websites where the creator has not given permission for them to be used. AI is posing new challenges such as how copyright will deal with issues such as large language models
being trained on copyright intellectual properties.
Software licenses
One way to classify software is by its ownership as either:
- Open source software
- Proprietary software
Open source software is freely available and has no copyright. People are free to view and modify the source code but must also then share any derivative works they create.
Many programmers can contribute to the development of open source software, improving it and adding new features. On the downside, there may be limited support for open source
software and there is no guarantee it is thoroughly tested and bug free.
Proprietary software is copyright, so you must pay for a licence to use it. It is well tested and if not bug free then patches to fix errors will be made freely available.
Proprietary software is generally well supported. Features may be updated over time but likely at additional cost. Cost is the primary downside. Proprietary software may be
limited in the ways you can customise it for your own uses. Licenses may be limited to a set number of machines.