Ethical, Legal, and Security Issues
of Spatial Technologies
Chapter 11 Slides from
James Pick, Geo-Business: GIS in the Digital
Organization, John Wiley and Sons, 2008.
Copyright © 2008 John Wiley and Sons.
DO NOT CIRCULATE WITHOUT
PERMISSION OF JAMES PICK
Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
and Sons
The challenge of Spatial Ethics and
Law
• Spatial technologies are brilliant in analyzing the
earth and its human activity including in minute
detail and meter accuracy.
• Although we have seen these technologies
helping business, government, and society, they
can also be used for crime, terrorism, privacy
invasion, and dishonest manipulation, or they
can unintentionally cause harm, business
mistakes, regulatory errors, and financial losses.
Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
and Sons
A few examples
• GPS and GIS can be used for drug smuggling.
Drugs could be exchanged or stashed at
particular locations based on GPS coordinates.
• RFID tags could be surreptitiously affixed to
personal objects that would yield information
to a portable RFID reader that could be used
for intrusion or spying.
• A business could exaggerate some map
features and reduce others to favor regulatory
rulings.
• Geo-segmentation applied to a small area may
profile a person very differently form who they
are. This not only misrepresents them, but
might have economic or discriminatory
penalties.
Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
and Sons
Topics Covered
• Brief general background on GIS ethics,
• Examples of spatially-related ethical
dilemmas.
– Ethical issues of geodemographics
• Privacy and privacy rights
• Law for concepts of place and space
• Security issues of spatial technologies.
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Theories of Ethics
• Ethical relativism is based on the assumption
that ethics is relative.
– GIS ethics would be different in distinct cultures or
contexts. The problem is that the differences are left
hanging, are not resolved.
• Utilitarianism determines right and wrong
depending on the consequences (Johnson,
2001). Behavior and actions are good, if they
imply that happiness dominates in the
consequences.
– An issue for spatial technologies is that they often
have multiple stakeholders – users, customers,
stockholders, regulators, so happiness may be hard
to ascertain. Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
and Sons
Ethical Theories (cont.)
• Deontological theories emphasize the inherent
character of an act. A person who adheres to
these theories has a sense of “duty.”
– The book gives the example of whether a trucking
firm should locationally track its drivers at all times.
Doe that violate a moral rule?
Class Question. Can you give another ethical
example where a spatial problem needs to be solved by
a moral rule?
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Ethical Dilemmas and Issues of
GIS and Spatial Technologies
• The ethical question of what map accuracy is best for
the customer. This has been a controversy between
surveyors and GIS professionals.
• Some sub-industries and professions demand high
positional accuracy, including commercial real estate,
architecture, land development, and civil engineering.
• Both surveyors and GIS analysts have certain
competencies in map accuracy, but they compose and
produce maps through quite different procedures
(Butler, 2005).
• The ethical issue is whether to fully disclose these
different professional claims and the full aspects of
accuracy to clients or customers.
Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
and Sons
Ethical Issue for Web Map Service
Providers such as Google Earth
• Web map service providers show maps and satellite
imagery for a large portion of the globe at a resolution
that reveals building structures and even large vehicles.
• It allows scrutiny of land surface areas that some
governments are adverse to having as public knowledge,
as well as other types of secure areas.
• This leads to an ethical issue of full freedom of
information and service to customers versus respecting
the security concerns of certain countries.
– This issue may appear settled on the side of the service
providers and customers, but will become a larger issue if the
resolution of map imagery improves even more for the public.
– It may become an issue involving domestic conflict if more
detailed features of homes and other private places become
public knowledge.
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Ethical Issues in Geodemographics
• Geodemographics firms characterize
neighborhoods and small areas, so
everyone in a small area might be
consolidated together to have one profile.
• This becomes an ethical issue if the
representation of the individual affects
eligibility for economic and social benefits
such as credit.
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and Sons
Ethical Issues in GIS map design
• This involves visualization that exaggerates the
dimension of particular features to make them
more prominent.
• An example is an environmental map from an
activist group that emphasized the noise impact
from freeways by increasing ten-fold the width of
freeways on the map relative to other features.
• Although it makes the point better for clients, it
raises ethical questions of responsible and fair
display of information.
Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
and Sons
Ethical Issues in RFID
• RFID tags can be affixed to business high-value items,
inventory items, vehicles, animals, and people. Some
common applications are U.S. military inventory,
business inventories such as Wal-Mart, vehicles moving
past toll booths on freeways, taking school attendance,
monitoring medical patients, checking and counting
livestock, reading drivers’ licenses in some states, and
since 2006 reading U.S. passports.
• Ethical issues occur when businesses consider when to
dispose of the RFID tags in the supply chain.
• A decision to leave tags on for-sale or sold merchandise
raises ethical issues of full disclosure and potential for
privacy invasion. For instance, tags left on jewelry could
tip off thieves with portable RFID readers on potential
targets.
Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
and Sons
RFID Chips Implanted in People
• People can carry or wear RFID devices,
but an RFID tag also can be injected by a
syringe under a person’s skin (Havenstein,
2005), where it is durable for up to 100
years (see Figure 11.1). The procedure
cost only about $200 in 2005 (Bradley,
2005).
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and Sons
VeriChip RFID Tag for Injection
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and Sons
RFID Implants in Health Care
• In health care, the implanted RFID chip can be scanned
at locations in a hospital or other health facility, providing
access to the patient’s medical record. For example, the
patient’s record can be scanned on check-in to a waiting
room, increasing efficiency. If the patient receives a test
in a hospital area, his/her full record can be available on
arrival of the patient in order to administer the test under
correct protocols. At the same time, at each RFID read
point, the patient’s spatial location is recorded.
Consolidating the information from multiple patients, the
mapping and spatial analysis of the patient population
and its movements in the hospital can be performed.
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Issues in Implanted RFID Tags
• The FDA approved the uses of the implanted
RFID tags for patients in October of 2004, there
are several constraints to their use.
• One is the patient’s fear of being injected with an
unfamiliar device that appears to intrude on
privacy.
• A second problem is the paucity of RFID readers
at hospitals and clinics. Presently, a person
injected with an RFID chip has spotty availability
of RFID readers.
Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
and Sons
Injected RFID Chips –
John Halamka of
Harvard Medical
School has one
John Halamka (see Figure 11.2), Chief
Information Officer of both Harvard
Medical School and Beth Israel
Deaconess Medical Center and
emergency room physician, is an
example of an early adopter, having
received his VeriChip implant in late
2004 (see Figure 11.3).
Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
and Sons
Dr. Halamka sought to get
familiar with the device for
his roles in medical IT
planning and his own
patients.
Dr. Halamka being
iniected with an
RFID chip.
He also has a personal
reason, since he is an avid
mountain climber, so the
device might be life-saving,
assuming that the doctors
who might care for him have
access to an RFID reader
and can link through the
internet to his record at Beth
Israel Deaconess Medical
Center (Havenstein, 2005).
Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
and Sons
RFID chips for the Elderly – Ethical Issues
As the world’s population ages, the elderly will
become more prevalent, many of whom are
debilitated and have problems with simple
daily tasks. RFID tags can be placed at key
locations in the living areas of the elderly, and
the elderly person can be outfitted with a
small, portable RFID reader on a glove or
necklace.
Example, RFID can monitor
where the elderly person is
and what medications they
are taking on an hour-byhour basis (Wired Magazine,
3/19/04)
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click
The Elderly – cont.
• A home or health-care facility can have RFID
tags placed on key items such as a toothbrush,
doorway, toilet seat, and tea cup. As the elderly
person moves around in his/her daily activities,
the wearable RFID reader activates tags in the
environment, showing the daily individual’s daily
movements and indicates activities, as well as
any glitches or problems that occur.
• RFID readers record the whereabouts of the
patients, so patients throughout a hospital
system can be located. For patients and the
elderly, implanted RFID offers quick and
effortless recording of personal information.
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and Sons
VeriChip
Roam Alert
System
Source: VeriChip, 2007
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and Sons
Privacy and Spatial Technologies
• Privacy is defined as the capability of an
individual to determine and decide “when, how,
and to what extent information about him/her is
communicated to others” (Westin, 1967, cited in
Cho, 2001).
• The U.S. Supreme Court has held the right to
privacy is provided in the First, Fourth, Fifth, and
Ninth Amendments to the Constitution (Griswold
v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 679 (1965)). At the
same time, some states have legislated privacyprotection rights.
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(Source: Cho, 2004)
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Table 11.1 U.S. Federal Privacy Legislation Significant for GIS (cont.)
(Source: Cho, 2004)
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and Sons
The Law and Spatial Technologies
• There is not time to go into all of the background on GIS
law and the principles involved. Instead several
examples are give of legal issues with GIS and spatial
applications.
• In Kern River Gas Transmission Co. v. Coastal Corp
(1990), a plaintiff created a map from topographic
features of USGS topographic maps, but added a gas
transmission pipeline and data that the company
collected. The court’s ruling was that the company did
not have copyright protection, since the gas elements
shown on the map, even though “new,” were pictorial
and hence ideas. The “merger doctrine” applied so the
map could not be copyrighted (Cho, 2005). This points to
the need for spatial companies to go beyond simple
pictorial elements on maps and do more complicated
map expression to achieve copyright.
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Patents and GIS
• A patent involves a formal series of steps
carried out with the U.S. government to
protect an original invention.
• If a patent is granted, the inventor is given
protection against others from using,
making, or selling the property, while also
giving the inventor the ability to license
others to use the patented property
(Johnson, 2001).
Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
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Example of GIS Patent Issue: Multi-map
• A well-known but controversial patent example is U.S.
Patent No. 6,240,360, granted to Sean Phelan of
Multimap Inc., a London-based company, on May 29,
2001, and listed as a computer system to identify local
resources (Reed, 2003; Cho, 2005). It is also covered by
European Patent EP0845124B and patents in other
countries. Hence Multimap Inc. can claim royalties on it.
• The patent covers a fairly broad class of arrangements
for map serving over the internet. The arrangement
involves a request for a map by a client computer. The
request goes to two servers: (a) an information server
that retrieves and responds with data on at least one
place of interest, and (b) a map server that responds to
the map request with a map. The information on the
place or places of interest is overlaid on the requested
map, giving the full display to the client. For a patent
infringement to occur, all the steps shown in the figure
must be involved.Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
and Sons
Design Covered by U.S. Patent No.
6,240,360 “A Computer Systems to
Identify Local Resources”
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and Sons
(Source: Cho, 2004)
Multi-map Case - Outcome
• To successfully challenge this patent, the
challenge must be based on evidence that the
patent is either obvious or not new, with “new”
referring to before the date of the U.S. patent
application of August 16, 1995.
• The patent has been upheld so far and is in
effect until 2016. The Multimap patent dominates
in internet mapping, although it doesn’t cover all
types of system arrangements.
• Some critics (Radcliffe, 2003; Reed, 2005)
question the validity of this patent, not
considering it to be “new” at the time of its
granting in 1995.
Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
and Sons
GIS Security – How to Protect People
and Organizations from Losses and
Crimes Related to GIS
• GIS and spatial technologies are a valuable asset for
businesses and need to be protected through security
procedures.
• If they are abused, damaged, or intruded into, the results
can be injurious to businesses and organizations.
• Consider that many ways organizations could be
interrupted, stopped, or rendered inaccurate by security
breaches.
• For firms such as Rand McNally and Sears that have realtime dependencies of spatial technologies from hour-tohour, protracted damage could be devastating.
• Another aspect is that spatial technologies can be
employed to help criminals.
Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
and Sons
Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
and Sons
Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
and Sons
Summary on Ethics, Law, and
Security for Spatial Technologies
• Ethical dilemmas are prevalent with GIS. They stem
from GIS’s often positive capabilities to pinpoint exact
location and movements along with detailed information
on people and objects. The dilemmas are often difficult
to resolve, and also dynamically changing.
• Ethical theories ethical relativism, utilitarianism, and
deontological give a framework to classify spatial ethical
decisions. However, they do not make the decision for
the individual.
• The Law is contending with cases involving many spatial
technologies and only beginning to determine a basis of
judgments.
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Summary (cont.)
• Security procedures are needed to protect
people and organizations from multiple
dimensions of threats from spatial technologies.
• Often the most serious threat comes from
insiders.
• The material in this lecture makes you aware of
and sensitive to spatial ethical, legal, and
security issues. However, it does not tell you
what to do in a business or personal situation if
you run into a conflict or dilemma. It may give
you a better framework to make your own
decision.
Copyright (c) 2008 by John Wiley
and Sons