Teaching and learning about geo-ethics with the Geoprivacy video series

Recently at a GIS conference I had the honor of meeting Colorado Mountain College GIS professor Dr Dara Seidl. Dr Seidl’s work I believe will have great interest to the readers of this blog, as much of it centers around geospatial data and societal issues. Dr Seidl recently completed a yearlong fellowship with the American Geographical Society, to study privacy issues. Her findings are featured in an eight-part series of short educational videos, the Geoprivacy Series. These engaging videos are accompanied by guidelines for educators to help them fully use each video in instructional settings. Each set of guidelines contains a link to the video, a summary of the video, activities, guiding points for class discussions, and article links for digging deeper into the issue. But I would argue that these resources are so well done and so relevant to everyday life that they should be viewed by everyone, not just instructors and students.

Topics covered in these resources include the potential to falsely identify crime suspects to using GPS data to track shopping and dining habits of private citizens, smart energy and tracking, a bicycle theft from a social media ad for that bicycle, and personal disturbing text messages based on location. I found them all to be personal and disturbing, but relevant and important to discuss.

One of these intriguing videos features a mock interview with a “repo man,” an employee for a vehicle
repossession company, talking about his use of automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology. The interviewee discusses how the ALPR camera system on his “spotter car” continuously collects license plate data, along with location, time, date, and photographs of all cars along his daily driving routes. He notes
that he specifically targets certain parking lots and apartment complexes, and his company sells all the license plate location data to police, banks, and insurance companies. In the educator guidelines accompanying this video, Dr Seidl suggests several intriguing activities, such as identifying and mapping nearby surveillance cameras and filing a FOIA request. The discussion points begin with a series of intriguing questions, such as: “Does ALPR lead to uneven surveillance between groups? If so, which groups of people are more likely to be surveilled? Is it fair to target certain neighborhoods or parking lots with ALPR, as the “repo man” in this video claims to do? Should companies be legally allowed to
collect license plate locations and pictures? Is it fair to use systematic location surveillance to fight fraud?
The “repo man” in this video claims that using mobile ALPR cameras is just like walking down the street recording plates with a pen and paper. Is this a valid claim?”

Dr Seidl’s approach to these issues closely aligns with our own here on Spatial Reserves: That these issues are too important not to be taught, and that they can be taught in engaging ways with real-world scenarios and with hands-on activities.

I highly encourage you to not only view these resources, but to use these in your own instruction and in your conversations with colleagues and stakeholders.

Dr Dara Seidl, right, along with 2 snippets from her GeoPrivacy educational resources.

—Joseph Kerski