Category Archives: social media

Is the debate over the ethical use of geospatial data dead?

Posted on June 17, 2021 | Leave a comment

I was watching the third episode of Penn State’s fascinating series, Geospatial Revolution, this week when I was so struck by a comment that I had to rewind, and rewind again, to jot it down. The speaker was Jeff Jonas of the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, who said, “I think that a surveillance society is not only inevitable and irreversible, I have come to this conclusion that it’s irresistible. And it is not governments doing it to us, it’s us doing it to ourselves … The more data that’s available out there the more transparent the world becomes, and the question is, how do people feel about that?”

Hmmmm… How do people feel about that?

Once a hotly debated topic in geospatial intelligence circles, the debate over privacy and other sticky ethics concerns associated with advanced geotracking and location intelligence has all but disappeared from public discourse. A quick online search yields article and forum results from more than a decade ago, with scant recent results.

Are we to believe that the ethical use of geospatial data has been adequately addressed with recent privacy and data management laws, or have we simply given up the debate?

Geospatial industry giants like GISCI and URISA still include a code of ethics on their websites, as does UNICEF. Our own GeoInspirations columnist, Dr. Joseph Kerski, also endorsed an ethical code in his contribution to Spatial Reserves. But when was the last time you actually considered the ethics of your position?

Looking through the GISCI/URISA code of ethics, I’m struck by how difficult part four is in practice today. It reads:

IV. Obligations to Individuals in Society

The GIS professional recognizes the impact of his or her work on individual people and will strive to avoid harm to them. Therefore, the GIS professional will:

1. Respect Privacy

Protect individual privacy, especially about sensitive information.
Be especially careful with new information discovered about an individual through GIS-based manipulations (such as geocoding) or the combination of two or more databases.

2. Respect Individuals

Encourage individual autonomy. For example, allow individuals to withhold consent from being added to a database, correct information about themselves in a database, and remove themselves from a database.
Avoid undue intrusions into the lives of individuals.
Be truthful when disclosing information about an individual.
Treat all individuals equally, without regard to race, gender, or other personal characteristic not related to the task at hand.

How do we apply this to real life situations that we are likely to encounter on the job? And are you prepared to push back on what you believe to be an unethical request?

You haven’t encountered an ethical dilemma on the job? If you haven’t yet, the day will most likely come, as it did for the SeaTac GIS coordinator in 2015 who was asked by the interim city manager to provide household and neighborhood data for the local Sunni and Shiite Muslim population. Among the project goals was to identify the location of “Americans who had not adopted American ways.” The coordinator, uncomfortable with the request, enlisted the support of the city attorney as well as other city staff to push back, and ultimately did not provide the information. Can you think of times when an “unreasonable” request may seem reasonable, or the lines gray and blur? Do you know what you would have done in her shoes?

Penn State has an archive of thought-provoking, true-to-life case studies to get us thinking about our responses and responsibilities, created as part of the GIS Professional Ethics Project. Each study presents a dilemma and requires that you reason your way through to what you perceive to be an ethical response. A seven-step reasoning process taken from “Ethics and the University” is included to help. Read a few studies and ask yourself how you might apply the seven-step process to come up with an adequate response. Ask a colleague how they would respond. You might find yourself in a lively debate.

While there is room for disagreement, we must agree there is no room for complacency. GIS and geospatial technologies have great power to influence society – from determining who gets scarce resources, to who gets bombed in the next geopolitical conflict. With such great power comes great responsibility. Diana Sinton shared some wonderful insights on how we discuss ethics to impact our professional environments in What Makes ‘Do No Harm’ Extra Difficult in the Geospatial World Today? What do others have to say about ethical concerns? A few years ago, DirectionsMag hosted a webinar on the ethics that may offer insights as well.

Prepare yourself by reviewing case studies and engaging in discussion with colleagues and employers. Stay ahead of the latest ethical challenges by regularly stopping by our Ethics topic page, and reviewing the efforts by geospatial technology providers to address privacy and other concerns, as Esri has done with its Geospatial Virtual Data Enclave.

What effort can you make within your own environment, today, to safeguard the ethical use of the geospatial data to which you have access?

Reposted from The DirectionsMag Geospatial Community Blog, an extension of Directions Magazine. Visit us for daily geospatial news, exclusive articles, geospatial webinars, and podcasts. If you are interested in contributing, please email editors@directionsmag.com.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/debate-over-ethical-use-geospatial-data-dead-rebeckah-flowers/

A Few Hits and a Miss

Posted on April 30, 2018 | Leave a comment

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the annual conference that Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis holds. This year the theme was Space & Time in Data Science, and panelists shared stories and nuggets of wisdom for the audience of geographers, geographic information scientists, computer scientists, statisticians, data scientists, and others. Upon prompting for a show of hands about who fell into the different disciplinary categories, many confessed to wearing multiple hats among those roles. Which I think was one point of this event: to foster multi-disciplinary conversations in a place where there aren’t enough going on naturally.

Some of the more noteworthy comments were from:

Francisca Dominici, a biostatistician and co-Director of Harvard’s Data Science Initiative, whilst talking about methods for causal inference and scientific reproducibility, wondering whether in fact there exists *anything* that we can really control so we can make inferences about today’s world. She described the CGA as an entity able to help connect the data science talents across campus.
Peter Fox, from RPI. He shared the success that the knowledge network behind the Deep Carbon Observatory has been and was refreshingly forthcoming in his description of how attempts at a University Network of Things hasn’t worked. I am increasingly interested in research infrastructure, and knowledge networks are an important component. As an aside, they have a GIS for Science class at RPI but nothing from the syllabus distinguishes it from basic intro GIS course that uses open-source software and apps.
Amelia McNamara who had a fountain of ideas I liked, including the notion of an “interactive essay” – like this one one Exploring Histograms. I will definitely be having my students play with this Spatial-Aggregation Explorer. How Spatial Polygons Shape Our World (YouTube link) officially makes her an honorary geographer in my book. Except I’m not sure she wants to be one. She’s doing just fine with her own disciplines.

I had the second-to-the last slot in the last panel of the day. My own comments focused on the role of strategic communication for strategic bridge building (to better connect GIScience & data scientists). Strategic was to be the key word. I’d say four of my five ideas were reasonably on target but one went up in flames rather spectacularly.

I happen to know one (very bright, very engaged) data scientist who works at a data science company in the Silicon Valley, one that I’d never heard of before (or until recently, since). During a conversation with him earlier this year, I learned that he doesn’t know anything about GIScience AND he’d be interested in knowing more. That was that, and I totally forgot the name of his company until I looked him up again while preparing my talk.

So, on Friday afternoon I said that “data science start-ups might be a good place to broker some worthwhile conversations about GIScience,” and I included a screenshot from the website of the company I’d been holding up as an example, vis a vis their young data scientist who expressed curiosity about GIScience: Palantir.

It was late on a Friday afternoon, at the very end of a long day of intellectual prompts, technical rigor, and gobbledy-gook jargon. Brains were noticeably over-saturated. Time remaining only for a few questions or comments for the panelists. The first person who spoke is a GIScientist known for her critical (i.e., in the academic sense) observations. At that moment I really had no idea what she was saying. Her language may have seemed extra circuitous because my brain was tired or she was politely trying to be less direct. The only thing I really heard was her final emphatic statement that “… we’re not going to work with Palantir!”

Wait, what? She knows the company too? Yup, that Palantir. That’s the one. The one that I suggested to a crowd at Harvard that we GIScientists ought to play more with in the sandbox. Maybe not so strategic after all.

I was nicely wisened up by a few folks as we were departing the conference. In the big scheme of things, as we say in Portuguese, não faz mal.

But I’m left with a bunch of conflicted feelings. I still think that conversations with data scientists at start-ups are a good thing. Not everyone working at Company P is mal-intentioned and sneaky, especially and definitely not my data scientist friend. Life is what you do, not what you say, so we let our actions speak for themselves. I spend way too much time sitting in a small home office by myself in a centrally-isolated patch of land in upstate New York. I crave the chance to develop and brainstorm ideas for talks with colleagues and within a community of practice. I sometimes learn from my mistakes.

Category Archives: social media

Is the debate over the ethical use of geospatial data dead?

A Few Hits and a Miss

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