IB Digital Society practice questions.

Transport for London introduced the Oyster smartcard in 2003, and every journey validated with the card is recorded. Which group is a stakeholder in this system although its members never carry the card?

• Passengers who choose to top up the card at a ticket machine rather than online
• Commuters who register the card to a personal online account
• Bus drivers, whose shift patterns are redrawn from the recorded journey data
• Tourists who buy a Visitor Oyster card at the airport before travelling

Answer: Bus drivers, whose shift patterns are redrawn from the recorded journey data

A stakeholder is anyone who affects a digital system or is affected by it, so staff whose rosters are rebuilt from the journey data qualify even though they are not users. The other three options all describe people holding the card, which is the narrower category candidates default to.

Safaricom launched M-Pesa in Kenya in 2007, letting people send money by text message years before most adults held a bank account or a smartphone. Which description of this change is most accurate?

• An existing network of bank branches was digitised so that the same transactions moved online
• A stage of infrastructure that other countries passed through was skipped
• The technology was adopted only after the banking system had been modernised
• The change was reversed once smartphones became common in the same market

Answer: A stage of infrastructure that other countries passed through was skipped

Kenya did not first build branch banking and then automate it; mobile transfer arrived in its place, so the sequence other markets followed was bypassed rather than repeated. Reading every change as the digitisation of an existing service is the habit this case is meant to break.

A hospital replaces patient names in a research extract with random codes and keeps the code-to-name key in a separate restricted file, so that patients can be re-contacted later. Under the GDPR this extract counts as

• anonymous data, because the names have been removed from the records
• pseudonymised data, and therefore still personal data
• aggregated data, because the records no longer describe individuals
• encrypted data, because identifiers were replaced by a coded value

Answer: pseudonymised data, and therefore still personal data

While a key exists that can reverse the substitution the people remain identifiable, so the full obligations continue to apply; only irreversible removal makes data anonymous. Encryption is a third thing again, reversible with a secret rather than with a lookup table.

Under the revised EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive, on-demand services offered in the European Union must reserve at least 30% of their catalogue for European works and give those works prominence. Which effect on cultural production is this obligation intended to have?

• More works are commissioned in European languages and settings
• Streaming traffic on European networks is reduced at peak times
• Subscription prices fall for viewers in smaller member states
• Viewers are prevented from watching works made outside Europe

Answer: More works are commissioned in European languages and settings

The quota is a supply-side measure: reserving catalogue space and prominence pulls commissioning money towards European production rather than restricting what viewers may watch. Prominence matters as much as the share, because a title nobody is shown is not really in the catalogue.

A regulator reports that 96 per cent of households in the country are covered by a mobile broadband network, yet only 41 per cent of adults used the internet in 2024. Which dimension of digital inequality does the distance between the two figures point to?

• Affordability and digital skills rather than network reach
• Coverage, because the signal does not physically reach the households
• Latency, because connections are too slow for the services people want
• Interoperability, because devices from different vendors cannot connect

Answer: Affordability and digital skills rather than network reach

Coverage measures where a signal exists; use measures whether a household can pay for a device and a bundle and knows what to do with them. Treating the divide as a coverage problem is the standard error, because it makes every remaining barrier invisible to the people funding the network.

Malware discovered in 2010 changed the operating speed of centrifuges at the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz in Iran while feeding previously recorded normal readings to the engineers' monitoring screens. Which feature of this operation changed how states assess security threats?

• Software alone produced physical damage to industrial machinery
• The engineers' monitoring screens were switched off for the whole of the operation
• Personnel files held at the plant were copied and then published by the attackers
• The operation was run from a network that the plant's own engineers controlled

Answer: Software alone produced physical damage to industrial machinery

Until then, damage to plant and machinery was assumed to require physical access or a weapon, so an operation that reached industrial control systems through software moved industrial sites into the category of targets that a state must defend. The screens were not disabled but spoofed, which is the detail that made the sabotage last.