Unit 4: Digital Impacts and Project Development
What you must understand
Unit 4 shifts from components to consequences and process. Know the social, ethical, legal and economic impacts of digital solutions: privacy and data sovereignty, intellectual property and licensing, accessibility and the digital divide, automation and employment, and environmental cost such as energy use and e-waste. Be able to argue both sides of an issue and reach a defensible position grounded in evidence rather than opinion.
Know the Australian Privacy Principles as a framework for handling personal information, and the purpose of copyright and Creative Commons licensing. Understand cyber-security fundamentals: confidentiality, integrity and availability; threats such as phishing, malware and social engineering; and controls such as authentication, encryption, access control and backup.
For project development, understand the design cycle (investigate, design, produce, evaluate) and iterative development. Know how to scope a project with constraints, success criteria and a timeline, and how to evaluate a solution against those criteria using evidence.
Traps
- Listing impacts without saying who is affected and how.
- Treating "ethical" and "legal" as synonyms - an action can be lawful yet unethical.
- Evaluating a solution by describing features rather than testing it against success criteria.
- Forgetting to recommend an improvement; evaluation questions usually expect one.
Worked example
Asked whether a school should use facial recognition for attendance, a strong answer states the benefit (efficiency, accuracy), the harm (biometric data is irrevocable if breached; consent and storage concerns under privacy principles), names stakeholders (students, parents, school), and recommends a proportionate alternative such as card-based scanning with a documented review.
Rule of thumb
For any impact question, use the pattern: impact → stakeholder → evidence → judgement.