"If a Young Child Wanders, Technology Can Follow"

A 2-Way Wrist Radio is preferable to an embedded chip - "If a Young Child Wanders, Technology Can Follow" | @NYTimes http://t.co/qAZxd9pctV
— Kenneth D. Pimple (@Ethical_PICT) November 3, 2013

Book on ethical guidance for PICT on its way

Emerging Pervasive Information and Communication Technologies (PICT): Ethical Challenges, Opportunities and Safeguards 

Edited by Kenneth D. Pimple,  Ph.D.

To be published by Springer; expected publication date June 30, 2013.

Description

This book provides a wide and deep perspective on the ethical issues raised by pervasive information and communication technology (PICT) – small, powerful, and often inexpensive Internet-connected computing devices and systems. It describes complex and unfamiliar technologies and their implications, including the transformative potential of augmented reality, the power of location-linked information, and the uses of “big data,” and explains potential threats, including privacy invaded, security violated, and independence compromised, often through widespread and lucrative manipulation.

PICT is changing how we live, providing entertainment, useful tools, and life-saving systems. But the very smartphones that connect us to each other and to unlimited knowledge also provide a stream of data to systems that can be used for targeted advertising or police surveillance. Paradoxically, PICT expands our personal horizons while weaving a web that may ensnare whole communities.

Chapters describe particular cases of PICT gone wrong, but also highlight its general utility. Every chapter includes ethical analysis and guidance, both specific and general. Topics are as focused as the Stuxnet worm and as broad as the innumerable ways new technologies are transforming medical care.

Written for a broad audience and suitable for classes in emerging technologies, the book is an example of anticipatory ethics – “ethical analysis aimed at influencing the development of new technologies” (Deborah Johnson 2010).

The growth of PICT is outpacing the development of regulations and laws to protect individuals, organizations, and nations from unintended harm and malicious havoc. This book alerts users to some of the hazards of PICT; encourages designers, developers, and merchants of PICT to take seriously their ethical responsibilities – if only to “do no harm” – before their products go public; and introduces citizens and policy makers to challenges and opportunities that must not be ignored.

For more information

Geographic Information Ethics and GIScience

The annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers will include two special sections  on Geographic Information Ethics and GIScience.

Session organizers are Rodolphe Devillers, Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland; Francis Harvey, Department of Geography, University of Minnesota; and Dawn Wright, Environmental Systems Research Institute and College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University.

From the organizers' Web site:

Ethical engagements with the multitude of GIS applications and uses, whether surreptitious or overt, have marked recent developments in the field. Indeed, the variety of applications of geographic information science & technology (GIS&T) has led the U.S. Department of Labor to highlight geospatial/geographic technologies as the third largest high-growth job field for the 21st century. While the potential benefits and risks of geographic technologies are becoming well known, these sessions provides a forum to engage ethical issues. For instance:

• Geographic technologies are surveillance technologies. The data they produce may be used to invade the privacy, and even the autonomy, of individuals and groups.
• Data gathered using geographic technologies are used to make policy decisions. Erroneous, inadequately documented, or inappropriate data can have grave consequences for individuals and the environment.
• Geographic technologies have the potential to exacerbate inequities in society, insofar as large organizations enjoy greater access to technology, data, and technological expertise than smaller organizations and individuals.
• Georeferenced photos, tweets and volunteered (and unvolunteered) geographic information can reveal private information. Those data that are increasingly publically available and used to study societal phenomena raise significant privacy concerns.

Papers in this session again engaged with the above issues in relationship to GIScience, including such topics as:

• case studies, curriculum development, or the pedagogy of teaching GIS ethical issues;
• issues of privacy, surveillance, inequity, erroneous or inappropriate data concerning geographic technologies;
• codes of ethics and conduct of professional organizations;
• GIS professional development;
• reflections on the changing nature of ethical issues in GIS&T

These sessions are co-sponsored by the AAG GI Systems & Science and Ethics, Justice, and Human Rights Specialty Groups.

My thanks to Deepsea Dawn Wright for sharing this information.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

Call for abstracts: Geographic Information Ethics and GIScience

Call for AAG 2013 Abstracts: 

Geographic Information Ethics and GIScience

http://dusk.geo.orst.edu/aag_ethics13.html

Following successful sessions at the 2009-2011 AAG meetings on ethics and GIScience, we are organizing sessions to continue and expand discussions of this important topic. Ethical engagements with the multitude of GIS applications and uses, whether surreptitious or overt, have marked recent developments in the field. Indeed, the variety of applications of geographic information science & technology (GIS&T) has led the U.S. Department of Labor to highlight geospatial/geographic technologies as the third largest high-growth job field for the 21st century. While the potential benefits and risks of geographic technologies are becoming well known, these sessions provides a forum to engage ethical issues. For instance:

• Geographic technologies are surveillance technologies. The data they produce may be used to invade the privacy, and even the autonomy, of individuals and groups.
• Data gathered using geographic technologies are used to make policy decisions. Erroneous, inadequately documented, or inappropriate data can have grave consequences for individuals and the environment.
• Geographic technologies have the potential to exacerbate inequities in society, insofar as large organizations enjoy greater access to technology, data, and technological expertise than smaller organizations and individuals.
• Georeferenced photos, tweets and volunteered (and unvolunteered) geographic information can reveal private information. Those data that are increasingly publicly available and used to study societal phenomena raise significant privacy concerns. 

Papers in this session again engaged with the above issues in relationship to GIScience, including such topics as:

• case studies, curriculum development, or the pedagogy of teaching GIS ethical issues; 
• issues of privacy, surveillance, inequity, erroneous or inappropriate data concerning geographic technologies;
• codes of ethics and conduct of professional organizations;
• GIS professional development;
• reflections on the changing nature of ethical issues in GIS&T

These sessions are co-sponsored by the AAG GI Systems & Science and Ethics, Justice, and Human Rights Specialty Groups.

To participate: 

1. Please register for the AAG 2013 meeting and submit your abstract online following the AAG Guidelines (http://www.aag.or/cs/anualmeeting/call_for_papers).
2. Please send your paper title, PIN, and abstract no later than Wednesday, October 20 to Rodolphe Devillers (rdeville@mun.ca), Francis Harvey (fharvey@umn.edu), or Dawn Wright (dwright@esri.com).

"Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool"

A recent article published in the New York Times ("Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool" by Eric Lichtblau, March 31, 2012) reveals that local police forces - not just the FBI and CIA - are now using cellphone tracking as "a powerful and widely used surveillance tool ... with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight."

If that's not bad enough, some carriers are profiting at their customers' expense.

The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.

The police, naturally, claim that the practice saves lives. "Law enforcement officials" contacted by the Times "said the legal questions were outweighed by real-life benefits."

The police in Grand Rapids, Mich., for instance, used a cell locator in February to find a stabbing victim who was in a basement hiding from his attacker.

I assume that the police are mostly tempted to use tools that they find helpful, which is good and proper. But to disregard the legality of such use - that's another matter.

The law in this area is not yet clear, so perhaps the police and the cellphone companies should be given the benefit of the doubt. But I, for one, am unwilling to do so until they convince me that warrants aren't necessary.

Special thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained "5,500 pages of internal records ... from 205 police departments nationwide" and provided them to the Times.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

Privacy in your car, online, in your pocket, in your back yard

A cluster of articles in the New York Times highlight a number of technologies, practices, and laws that threaten our privacy. Taken in chronological order:

1. Private Snoops Find GPS Trail Legal to Follow by Erik Eckholm (January 28, 2012). The good news is that on January 23, 2012, "the Supreme Court held that under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, placing a GPS tracker on a vehicle is a search," meaning that the police will have to get a warrant to do so. The bad news is that the a mere $300 can let you buy "a device no bigger than a cigarette pack, attach it to a car without the driver’s knowledge and watch the vehicle’s travels — and stops — at home on your laptop." You can easily keep track of your teenager, your spouse, your business rival, a potential victim. In some of these cases it would be legal, in others not; but it would be so easy to do and so hard to get caught. (See also Privacy, Technology and Law by Barry Friedman (January 28, 2012) for more on recent Supreme Court decisions.)
   
   
2. Should Personal Data Be Personal? by Somini Sengupta (February 4, 2012). Whether it should be, it isn't; rather it's a commodity so valuable that "In the United States alone, companies spend up to $2 billion a year to collect" data we routinely share on the Internet. Differing cultural attitudes toward privacy - splitting Europe and the U.S., for example - make it difficult or impossible to regulate the ways that international enterprises can collect and use personal data online.
   
   
3. Mobile Apps Take Data Without Permission by Nicole Perlroth and Nick Bilton (February 15, 2012). "Companies that make many of the most popular smartphone apps for Apple and Android devices — Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram among them - routinely gather the information in personal address books on the phone and in some cases store it on their own computers." That we now know about this is a step forward.
   
   
4. Drones Set Sights on U.S. Skies by Nick Wingfield and Somini Sengupta (February 17, 2012). But in a step backward, a new Federal law requires the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to allow commercial use of drones - small, remote controlled, inexpensive aerial surveillance devices.

   “As privacy law stands today, you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy while out in public, nor almost anywhere visible from a public vantage,” said Ryan Calo, director of privacy and robotics at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University. “I don’t think this doctrine makes sense, and I think the widespread availability of drones will drive home why to lawmakers, courts and the public.”

It's a brave new world out there. Or will be soon.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

Mind-controlled robots, the Supreme Court on GPS, Wii without a wand, and computers that write

A small avalanche of PAIT-related articles buried me this weekend; let me see whether I can dig my way out.

• Disabled Patients Mind-Meld With Robots by Sara Reardon (ScienceNOW, September 6, 2011) - Using Skype and wearing "a cap of tiny electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes," two people "whose lower bodies were paralyzed and who had been bed bound for 6 or 7 years" controlled the movements of a modified commercial robot - Robotino -100 kilometers away. They used only their brain waves - no moving eyes, no twitching fingers. The paralyzed subjects had been trained for 1 hour a week for 6 weeks. The system had been tested earlier with non-paralyzed people, and the paralyzed subjects "performed just as well as the healthy subjects." Think of what this would mean to paralyzed people and their friends and families - it would be a miracle.
  
  My enthusiasm is, of course, always tempered by caution. The Hollywood version would have someone hack the system and take control of the robot to frame a paralyzed person for murder. My real concern, though, is accessibility. There's no mention in the article how much this rig would cost, and the manufacturer of Robotino, Festo Didactic, lists all of the prices associated with Robotino as "on request." I fear this is an instance of "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it."


• Court Case Asks if ‘Big Brother’ Is Spelled GPS by Adam Liptak (New York Times, September 10, 2011) - At least three federal judges have compared the use of global positioning system (GPS) devices by police to George Orwell's novel, 1984. In November, the Supreme Count "will address a question that has divided the lower courts: Do the police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time?"
  
  The answer seems obvious to me (hint: it begins with a "y"), but with the current court I'm not making any bets.


• Remote Control, With a Wave of a Hand by Anne Eisenberg (New York Times, September 10, 2011) - "Scientists at Microsoft Research and the University of Washington have come up with a new system that uses the human body as an antenna. The technology could one day be used to turn on lights, buy a ticket at a train station kiosk, or interact with a world of other computer applications. And no elaborate instruments would be required." No need for a Wii wand or the Kinect's cameras that track motion.
  
  Nothing is said about whether this technology could be used to identify and track specific individuals (is your repertoire of everyday gestures as distinctive as your face or fingerprints?).


• In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column, allegedly by Steve Lohr (New York Times, September 10, 2011) - I had heard some time ago about the effort to make computers write newspaper-style sports articles based solely on the statistics of the game. That such writing would soon be indistinguishable from prose written by a human sports writer I did not doubt. The time seems to be near.
  
  Somehow I can't get excited by this one.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"'Death by GPS' in desert"

I've written about the unintended downside of relying too heavily on GPS, mobile telephones, and similar locational technologies in two earlier posts, the first about simply getting lost and the second describing several ways people visiting U.S. national parks have managed to get themselves into trouble using these devices.

This article by Tom Knudsen, published in The Sacramento Bee (Jan 30, 2011) describes the grim stories of people who have died in Death Valley National Park and Joshua Tree National Park after they entered these rugged areas unprepared for 120 degree (F) temperatures and wound up on impassable roads.

These are not just stories of unimaginable suffering. They are reminders that even with a growing suite of digital devices at our side, technology cannot guarantee survival in the wild. Worse, it is giving many a false sense of security and luring some into danger and death.

According to Charlie Callagan, Death Valley wilderness coordinator, "Some of the databases on the GPS units are showing old roads that haven't been open in 40 years." He's been "working with technology companies to remove closed and hazardous roads from their navigation databases – but with only partial success."

There has been a huge increase in summertime visitors to Death Valley, "from 97,000 in 1985 to 257,500 in 2009," an increase of 165%. It would be interesting to know the causes of the increase and whether locational technologies have played a large role. There's no way to tell from the article whether the per-visitor death rate has increased proportional to, slower than, or faster than the rate of increase in visitors. Whatever the case, clearly the providers of GPS services have a heavy responsibility to make their devices safer, at least by removing abandoned roads in dangerous areas, perhaps by removing places like Death Valley from their systems entirely.

Thanks to Don Searing for bringing this article to my attention.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Technology Leads More Park Visitors Into Trouble"

This article, published on August 21 in the New York Times, describes some of the ways in which technology - cell phones, cell phone cameras, satellite location devices - have been used to dangerous or costly effect in U.S. national parks. The stories recounted all strike me as caused by a lack of common sense, or by simple stupidity, abetted by technology. A more generous interpretation is that, at least in some cases, the technology leads some people to take greater risks, confident that they can be saved by dialing 911.

Do such events indict technology, individual boneheads, a society of boneheads, or the nanny state?

Thanks to Don Searing for bringing this article to my attention.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

Geographic Information Ethics and GIScience

The 2010 meeting of the Association of American Geographers included a session on "Geographic Information Ethics and GIScience." The full results from the session can be found at

http://dusk.geo.orst.edu/aag_ethics10.html. 

Thanks to Dawn ("Deepsea Dawn") Wright, Department of Geosciences, Oregon State University, for sharing this information.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"A Casualty of the Technology Revolution: ‘Locational Privacy’"

A commentary in today's New York Times, citing the Electronic Frontier Foundation, outlines and raises concerns about widely-used technologies that make it easy to record our every movement - probably not news to readers of this blog, but possibly an eye-opener to many people.

Here are the recommendations from near the end of the commentary.

What can be done? As much as possible, location-specific information should not be collected in the first place, or not in personally identifiable form. There are many ways, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, to use cryptography and anonymization to protect locational privacy. To tell you about nearby coffee shops, a cellphone application needs to know where you are. It does not need to know who you are.

When locational information is collected, people should be given advance notice and a chance to opt out. Data should be erased as soon as its main purpose is met. After you pay your E-ZPass bill, there is no reason for the government to keep records of your travel.

Are these measures adequate? How can they be implemented? Please share your thoughts and comments.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Swedish tourists miss island due to GPS typo"

A July 28 story from the Associated Press relates how a couple wanting to drive to the island of Capri misspelled the name in their GPS and wound up "some 400 miles (660 kilometers) away in the northern industrial town of Carpi."

Sometimes technology is only as smart as its users. How sophsticated would an AI have to be to have prevented this mishap?

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director