Legal and Ethical Considerations

Laws are in place to protect users data and privacy. Computer laws can have alot of grey areas. For example, piracy laws are in place to regulate the distribution of media such as films or games. However, (P2P) Peer-to-peer file sharing exists. Does this count as piracy?

GDPR is putting a leash on data privacy. With GDPR even IP addresses can be considered personal data in some instances. GDPR purpose is to replace the ageing data protection act (1998) as the internet was in its infancy and a lot of technology that GDPR addresses did not even exist at the time of the data protection act was implemented.

Ethical considerations should be adhered to. There are many examples of poor ethical decisions across all areas of computer science. Facebook's tracking pixels which track people even if they do not use or have an account with facebook brings up many ethical concerns. You should only collect data that your service needs to operate.