
Ethics in Geo - chmaynard
https://macwright.org/2020/06/21/ethics-in-geo.html
======
totetsu
As this piece of writing is in the genre of critical reflection on the ones
own work and industry, and specifically the geospatial industry, it might be
an addition to the conversation to think about the ethical history of maps and
mapping. Geospatial tech today might be about data structures, tile apis, and
unit conversions, but it used to be a manual job. Mapping was big part of the
colonial world. In NZ extensive surveying work went had in had with land
confiscations and disenfranchisement of indigenous people from their land and
imposition of European legal systems. Survey pegs have become an icon of
colonial oppression in many NZ protests and art works.
[https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-
korihi/377785/leaseholder...](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-
korihi/377785/leaseholders-and-hapu-oppose-waitara-lands-bill)
[http://www.kennedywarne.com/tag/parihaka/](http://www.kennedywarne.com/tag/parihaka/)

This is an interesting essay including "surveyors' ... reflections on their
own role in the colonizing process" which make an interesting contextual
pairing with the The author of this post's own reflections 100+ years later.
[http://www.nzjh.auckland.ac.nz/docs/1997/NZJH_31_1_08.pdf](http://www.nzjh.auckland.ac.nz/docs/1997/NZJH_31_1_08.pdf)

~~~
shoo
tangent: Part 1 "State projects of Legibility and Simplification" of Scott's
book "Seeing Like a State" discusses how central bureaucracy likes to organise
things to make things more legible and tractable to centrally administration.
Examples in Scott's book include: assigning people surnames (all the better to
track and tax them), standardisation weights and measures, standardisation of
language. [https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-
state](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-state)

------
krebby
I think on some level putting work into the public sphere requires letting go
of how you hope it will be used. So long as there are incentives to profit off
of "unethical" industries, there will be people looking to exploit those
incentives. This is especially true when the published work is general-purpose
enough to be reused and the barriers to use are low.

Look at Amazon's facial recognition, for instance. OpenCV and the like have
existed for years but by tightly integrating with AWS, we've now unlocked
brand new use cases and customer bases -- say, startups and researchers on one
hand and police departments and authoritarian governments on the other. The
pool of qualified developers, and by definition number of developers who might
be willing to implement a facial recognition database for dissidents, goes up
significantly as the technology becomes easier to use.

For a map data format, you might make life easier for people drilling wells in
remote rural villages, but you might also be designing a data format for bomb
strikes.

~~~
tuukkah
Yeah, I don't see how this ethics in geo is any different from ethics in IT
(or technology, or science) in general: There's more money to be made and
easier to find VC funding in the more lucrative but less ethical applications.
This reflects how we as a society fund DoD more than we fund the Red Cross.

------
Doctor_Fegg
This is well expressed, and thought-provoking for those of us who work on open
source geo.

One (accidental) way to achieve “ethos licensing” as described in the article,
while remaining genuinely open source, is to license your code as WTFPL. I
started doing that facetiously to express my disdain for licence holy wars,
but it turns out that the bad guys are characterised by having large armies of
lawyers, and large armies of lawyers really don’t like WTFPL. Google
explicitly forbids it, and I’ve encountered other BigCos who won’t touch it.
That’s a pretty decent side-effect for those of us who don’t want to support
the ad-tracking industry.

(WTFPL does of course have the bug of not disclaiming warranty, but you can
trivially fix that by inserting the sentence “There is no f——ing warranty.”)

~~~
ATsch
AGPL does much of the same thing. Many bigcorps explicitly forbid it's use,
while private individuals are totally fine with it.

------
growlist
I worked for a global oil company a few years back. I had then and have now no
misgivings whatsoever about that work.

I think the average anti-oil person living in a developed country drastically
underestimates the centrality of hydrocarbons to our way of life, and the
devastating impact on all of our lives of a rapid shift to zero-carbon etc.
Think little food, modern medicine, sanitation, and drastically reduced
opportunities for travel and education for example - this would resemble the
lifestyle of someone living in Tipi Valley, which is the closest thing we have
to zero-carbon in the UK as of 2020, and even they effectively still parasite
themselves to a significant degree on the oil-driven economy.

I'm all for protecting the planet but the answers are so complex, and oil -
being such a wondrous substance with myriad applications - is so tightly woven
into our lives that it will take decades to unpick the linkages, and in many
cases this will likely not be possible unless we really are prepared to accept
giant steps backwards for civilisation.

That said, I'm all for tackling the worst excesses immediately. We could start
with swingeing punitive taxation on Canada and Germany, for example, for tar
sands and coal respectively. We could also introduce a complete ban on the use
of oil in favour of LNG for marine transportation.

Edit: I think this piece is remarkably smug, judgemental and bourgeois in
tone, and specifically as regards the military/police aspects, I'm reminded of
the quote attributed to Orwell (that may or may not be accurate, but sums up
my feelings well): 'People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because
rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf'.

~~~
Kednicma
I used to work in "geo", as the author puts it.

Oil is definitely important. It's the _only_ good that behaves
macroeconomically as if it were essential to everybody, and you're right that
organic chemistry, plastics, etc. are not just part of daily life, but
irreplaceably so.

That said, half of oil usage in the USA is for gasoline and diesel [0];
another 15% is natural gas produced as a byproduct of extraction. As we drive
and fly less, we'll need less fuel. Oil demand collapsed earlier this year
[1], and it could collapse over and over again until the industry shrinks to
the right size.

I don't think that taxation on oil imports is the right move, because it
doesn't limit the USA's oil exports. Instead, we ought to tax oil products,
specifically gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel; and use the funds to plan for
when oil is no longer as important to us.

[0] [https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-
produc...](https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/use-
of-oil.php)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Russia%E2%80%93Saudi_Arab...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Russia%E2%80%93Saudi_Arabia_oil_price_war)

------
tuukkah
I think that we as makers should professionally concentrate on finding and
amplifying the good uses of technology instead of trying to stop the bad uses.
The latter is a profession for the police, the judiciary and the lawmakers,
and what the rest of us can do (as citizens) is support and guide them
democratically.

------
SenHeng
IMO, the whole thing is unavoidable. A good amount of our technological
advancements have been built on find better ways to kill other humans.

Also, I'm not sure ethical licenses are going to deter inethical
organisations. Are any of the 3 digit agencies really going to stop using some
open source library just because there's some sentence somewhere that says
they disapprove of killing people?

~~~
Nasrudith
Hell the US Navy was caught pirating commercial software on warships before.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> And until we figure out ethos licensing or something similar, there’s no way
> to stop it.

I hope this is something we never figure out. Ethos based licensing is the
diametric opposite of Free as in Freedom software. The intentions may seem
noble, the unintended side effects will be devastating for the whole free
software ecosystem.

~~~
zzo38computer
> I hope this is something we never figure out.

Well, I agree. (Although, see what comment 23597740 says for another idea.)

Actually, I am against copyright (and patents, too) in general (although I am
willing to work with Free software, even if it isn't in the public domain,
everything I write myself (whether computer programs, stories, music, etc)
will be public domain). I certainly won't take contracts from the military and
that stuff, and I refuse to implement surveillance and that stuff, but if I
write something and it is published, let anyone do what they want with it,
including to modify it (and publish the modified version too, if they want the
modified version published). (Although computer programs can be published
without source codes, I always try to include source codes if I can, since if
I write a program, it is intended that it will be useful, and including the
source codes makes it more useful.)

------
jaspax
I read that article and found myself thinking... what else is left for geo if
we've rejected as "unethical" all four of military, policing, oil/gas, and
advertising? I'm sure there's still some nice projects around the edges that
have some use for this, but if you have ethical qualms about the industries
that account for the vast bulk of money and effort in your field... maybe you
should just find a different field, rather than trying to theorize your way
into an ethical way to keep contributing.

~~~
krebby
But that's the point. There are no resources to fund those "nice projects"
that don't fall into resource extraction, military industrial complex, or
advertising. There is absolutely a need for geo in other applications.
Nonprofits, micromobility, real estate, and news organizations are big ones
that come to mind. But funding, and the experts required to create those
applications, not so much. The air has been sucked out of the room.

~~~
tuukkah
To pick an example from the article, it's important that the simple MBTiles
format exists if the OGC GeoPackage is too complicated. This way, more good
can be achieved with less resources and fewer experts.

------
benjaminjosephw
It seems odd that we have generally accepted a view of what open source means
that is fundamentally libertarian in character. How we got here makes sense -
the Microsoft wars and the battle for free software were once about how we
retain control of our own technology. Now we are in a very different place
where that control has been assured to some extent. Open source is now
ubiquitous and so the ethical concerns we collectively focus on should perhaps
extend beyond these old debates.

Maybe it's time we examine our entrenched views on open source to allow for
some more nuanced discussions about responsibility and ethics in the things we
make. Just because it's open source clearly doesn't mean that I'm absolved of
responsibility for how it's used; so why do all open source licences
necessitate that I allow my work to be put to evil uses as well as good?

Can we continue indefinitely with these hollow definitions of "freedom" that
are devoid of any concept of responsibility or accountability for what we
create?

~~~
luckylion
> so why do all open source licences necessitate that I allow my work to be
> put to evil uses as well as good?

Most likely because defining good and evil is very, very hard, and you don't
want vague language in licences. "Not to be used by evil people" doesn't work,
because all it takes is to say "I'm not evil, thanks".

Saying "no military use" etc will also just open up a rabbit hole of what
exactly is military use, and you don't want to have a lot of court cases, and
you also don't want uncertainty, e.g. somebody building a SaaS product that
then has to vet all customers whether they may have military contracts, even
if it's only for catering at some event.

~~~
benjaminjosephw
I've never known a good software engineer to run away from a problem because
it's too hard. Ethics is hard - all the more reason to have smart people
grapple with the issues rather than ignore them.

~~~
luckylion
There are different kinds of problems, and some are super hard to solve while
also providing very little actual results. Creating a formula for your
personal ethics with all of its intricacies AND putting that into a succinct
licence that will be enforceable in court (and doesn't do more than you want
it to) is probably one of those.

It's reasonable to spend time on other things instead, especially since such a
licence would be very individual, because very few people have the exact same
views when you look at the details.

~~~
benjaminjosephw
There's a middle ground here. I don't need all of my individual ethical
beliefs encoded in a software licence. I also don't think we have to stop
short at the lowest common denominator of "freedom" without responsibility.
Enough people share a similar enough concept of justice for another approach
to be both possible and pragmatic.

Whether you are up for the challenge of thinking through the implications of
your contributions or not, you hold some of the responsibility for what you
create. Avoiding deeper reflection on those contributions is a dangerous
thing.

~~~
luckylion
> Enough people share a similar enough concept of justice for another approach
> to be both possible and pragmatic.

The issue isn't so much in "can you and some number of other people generally
agree on what you want", it's in putting that in clear terms into a licence
that a judge (or anybody, really) can read and clearly say who is and isn't in
violation. And you'll want to do it in such a way that it's not open to
interpretation, doesn't hinge on specific words etc, and preferably you'll do
it under 100 pages. It _is_ hard.

I believe that even agreement in what exactly you want isn't easy to achieve
as the degrees of separation are hard to pin down. Plenty of people will agree
to "no using this in drones that bomb people". Drones that only observe while
other drones (or human-piloted jets) drop the bombs? Drones that aren't in the
area but act as communication relays? A company that builds motors that, among
others, are used in one of those drones? A company that builds desks for that
drone-motor-company? And is this about _all_ military things, or only those
with offensive use, while e.g. a bunker-building company would be okay? What
about a shoe manufacturer that sells to the army?

You'll quickly find that the agreement is largest while it's vague and gets
smaller while you try to draw clearer lines.

At the same time, the more vague it is, the less will it be used because
nobody wants to risk basing their things on something that depends on how a
judge in some jurisdiciton understands some term.

It's not always that nobody cares or doesn't want to spend the energy on doing
it, sometimes it's just really hard. You're welcome to give it a go, I'm sure
all efforts are welcome in the field.

~~~
roonilwaslib
> It _is_ hard

Using modular licenses might mitigate the problem of managing a
frankendocument, but I have to agree: making ethos licensing viable would
require a ton of effort. The SPDX (Software Package Data Exchange) standard
includes boolean expressions to combine licenses[0], like `MIT AND ISC`. It
would be difficult but conceivable for a lawyer to write human-readable and
enforceable licenses each forbidding one specific use. Bundling licenses with
`AND` into cohesive super-licenses covering ethical standards would take more
effort. Figuring out what ethical standards a large-enough ecosystem of
engineers agrees upon is another herculean task.

Still, I think the efforts are worth it: I'd like to opt out of some
subsidizing fields of endeavor but not others. IANAL, just a programmer, but
I'd be interested in contributing to ethos-licensing-related projects.

[0]: [https://spdx.github.io/spdx-spec/appendix-IV-SPDX-license-
ex...](https://spdx.github.io/spdx-spec/appendix-IV-SPDX-license-expressions/)

~~~
luckylion
That would be a very interesting project indeed. The fun part would be to hand
the judge the syntax document and ask them to please "interpret" the licence
according to these rules.

Slightly related, I wonder whether complexity/length of licences plays a
factor in adoption. If you have something that is very widely known, somewhat
short and readable by lay-persons, you don't need to check it every time, you
figure out once that you're okay with working with XYZ Licence or you're not.
If you'd have to essentially parse complex expressions of licensing fragments,
I expect less adoption because of higher risk of catastrophic issues being
overlooked (much like I'd probably not buy a candy bar if the store asked me
to read & sign 12 pages of fine print to do so).

~~~
Nasrudith
It certainly does - I know when it comes to evaluating free or open tools the
last to be checked are "custom licenses".

