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July 2004 |
Identifying ethical and unethical activities in gis
Geospatial information is a key component of the cyberstalker's bag of tools,
permitting identification of individuals and ability to map their locations and activities using often freely available resources
such as online street maps and event announcements with accompanying lists
of participants, home and work addresses
Abuse of spatial information
Cyberstalking is a particularly vicious example of the loosening of respect for privacy that appears to be a consequence of the pervasiveness of information that characterizes the information society. By definition, geospatial information is information that permits objects, including humans and their homes and work places, and events, such as purchases of goods or services, to be located in space and time. Thus, geospatial information is a key component of the cyberstalker's bag of tools, permitting identification of individuals and ability to map their locations and activities using often freely available resources such as online street maps and event announcements with accompanying lists of participants, home and work addresses hovered from Web sites or e-mail lists.
While it is true that integration of multiple information sources for potentially nefarious purposes can also occur outside cyberspace, it is the ready, global, near-zero cost of access to a wide variety of disparate data sources in near rear real time that leads to potentially unethical use of these resources. Are all data providers thus ethically responsible to protect against such abuse? Is this technically possible?
Rights of citizens to access information
Ethical issues regarding access to information by citizens, especially in e-Governance debates, tend to hinge on defining 'public sector information' and determining what amount of such information is put into the public domain. It is important to note the distinction between 'public sector information' and 'information in the public domain'. The term 'public domain' is often used to indicate 'free' or 'available gratis', but the term implies legally that that no property rights or restrictions are associated with the information.
Since copyright exists immediately any creative work is expressed in some physical form, it must be explicitly disclaimed for the material to enter the public domain. Copyrighted material and patented inventions also enter the public domain when the protection expires or is revoked through legislation. 'Public sector information' is information produced by a public sector body, which may be in the public domain or strongly protected, depending on governmental and institutional policies. The definition of what types of organizations are in the 'public sector' varies with country and time, since agencies take on new roles due to policy changes and reorganization (Longhorn 2002). These debates are significant because such a large percentage of spatial information is considered to be either in the public domain or created by public sector agencies at local or national government level.
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