Ethics in Geo | Hacker News Reader

Ethics in Geo

macwright.org

130 pointschmaynard32 comments

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... 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

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

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.

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.

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.”)

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

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'.

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...

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

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

I'm sure the salary helped ;)

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.

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?

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

> 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.

> 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.)

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.

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.

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.

There's lots. You can do site selection (what's a good place for my cafe), neighbourhood analytics (how am I doing relative to stores near me), transportation policy (where are people going from where), public health (are people complying with a request to shelter-in-place and if not, what should we expect), detecting trends (are census demographics correlated with crime / fire / medical emergencies).

Honestly there's so much possible work here that isn't military, policing, oil/gas, or advertising.

When I worked in geo, the main focus was travel directions / traffic jams / road closures / etc.

Conservation planning and scientific research are my focus. Funding is extremely hard to find but the problems are interesting and tend to be net positive. Some conservation efforts can have a colonial feel but since most people are in it to "do good" there are strong efforts to keep those tendencies in check.

And even then there is the issue of multiplicity of uses of tools. Like the classic cyberpunk quote of "Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human." Tracking wildlife and growth could be applied to humans and chasing squatters.

Of course it still works on a direct and personal level in the same way you would microchip pets but object to doing it to humans.

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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...

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).

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

A particular piece of geo software is heavily used by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), famously dubbed "Dick Cheney's kill squads" and largely unaccountable to anybody except the president. Was it "good" to support them during the Obama era? How about the Bush era, or the Trump era? And how do you know who's next?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/06/the-end...

(Incidentally, this is not a hypothetical.)

What is the realistic alternative aside from being jealously paranoid hiding of all our works for fear that with effort somebody else might use it for evil? It essentially already requires guilds to remotely enforce and works to make the whole field weaker. The approach of deliberately keeping everyone ignorant as possible is in itself what many including myself would call evil.

It is already a field of tinkerers, enforcement would essentially require a "guild structure" in a world that already doesn't cooperate and any who could enforce it in themselves would be evil.

I can't help but roll my eyes at many of the so called ethical quandries because they are such obvious cases of scapegoating the actions of others. It is like trying to blame an olympic shooter for writing a book on safety and techniques for because the guy decided to spree shoot. How about blaming the original bad actors instead of leaping down the degrees of separation?

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