The internet got a laugh this week when we realized just how easily one person can influence something as seemingly infallible as Google Maps. Berlin-based artist Simon Weckert pulled a wagon full of 99 phones at a walking pace down empty city streets and tricked the world’s preeminent mapping platform into thinking Berlin’s traffic was …
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On the heels of December’s New York Times investigation of a set of 50 billion points harvested from smartphones comes another eye-opener on the state of personal data collection: facial recognition powered by scraping social media and other websites, packaged and sold to law enforcement. The company at the heart of this new article by privacy journalist Kashmir Hill …
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On January 1, California instituted the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), a law designed to protect consumer data and enhance privacy rights for state residents. You may have heard about CCPA in national legislative debates over privacy or followed the backlash from tech companies, but what exactly is the new privacy law? And what does …
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The new year provides us all a time to reflect on the past and set goals for the year to come. The past year has been one for the books for geospatial technology. The New York Times released studies on location tracking in December 2018 and December 2019 that changed the way we think about …
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The power of geolocation recently caught everyone’s attention with the New York Times story on a dataset of locations from 12 million cell phones over the course of several months. The original piece, and those that follow, raise a series of ethical questions that appear both in the article and in the comments. It reinforces …
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Google’s Street View project announced this week that it has hit a significant milestone–a “10 million mile” milestone, in fact. The tech giant has captured 10 million miles of photos in their Street View feature, enough mileage to circle the earth more than 400 times. Street View launched in 2007 and has increased its purview …
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While the American Geographical Society (AGS) is based in New York City, the EthicalGEO Initiative is international in scope. Given the global reach of GeoTech and GeoData, it is no surprise that a related conversation about the ethical implications of its utilization is taking place across the pond. Launched earlier this year, the Benchmark Initiative …
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I’m happy to have been selected as an EthicalGEO fellow by the American Geographical Society. I will be working on developing guidelines for mapping with vulnerable populations, and I am looking for those interested in and working on this topic to get in touch with me! I recently spent the summer in Nairobi, looking back …
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Collecting data is rarely a neutral exercise—and collecting geospatial data about informal settlements is never a neutral exercise. That is why upon becoming an EthicalGEO Fellow, and preparing to conduct a pilot project in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, I feel it is incumbent on myself to start first with the ethical dimensions of geospatial data …
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This “Democratizing Geospatial Technology Project,” funded by the EthicalGEO Fellowship program, has as its central vision, that environmental justice stakeholders themselves are best equipped to produce spatial data visualizations of their communities. The primary goal is the development of a community-based participatory mapping tutorial model, that can be replicated for use by grassroots organizations employing …
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