A Newly Emerging Ethical Problem in PGIS

Ubiquitous Atoque Absconditus and Casual Offenders for Pleasure

Koshiro Susuki

Faculty of Humanities, University of Toyama, 3190 Gofuku, Toyama, Japan

Keywords: Ubiquitous Mapping, Absconditus, PGIS, Geographic Information Ethics, Cyberbullying, Casual Offenders

for Pleasure.

Abstract: Thanks to the recent technological advances of cellular phones, the practical realization of GeoAPI and SNS,

and the consolidation of wireless LAN networks, hardware has become capable of providing portable high-

speed Internet access and interactive SNS, and people can now easily communicate far more, casually and

unboundedly, via the Internet. Currently, PGIS studies mainly look at the ‘sunny side’ of GIT progress.

Although there are also relevant studies on online ethics, they rely unduly on spontaneously arising

equilibrium innervated by mutual surveillance among the people involved. However, it is an over-optimistic

and ingenuous perception regarding this exponential technological advance. In this paper, the author

illustrates the existence of ‘casual offenders for pleasure’ by referring to two recent online cyberbullying

incidents. Because the appreciation of technology-aided ubiquitous mapping can be very hard to see or to

grasp, especially for people not educated and trained to see it, the advances prompt people to nonchalantly

lower technical and ethical barriers. Further studies are essential to establish the geographic information

ethics and offer a clear-cut answer for this newly emerging problem.

1 INTRODUCTION

On 6 November 2012, a murder occurred in Zushi

City, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. Although the

victim had secretly relocated to an apartment at that

time to escape from the criminal’s repeated stalking,

the 40-year-old criminal somehow found the

apartment into which his ex-lover had moved,

invaded it, and stabbed her to death before hanging

himself. It is commonly called the ‘Zushi stalker

murder case’.

According to The Japanese Metropolitan Police

Department, the numbers of stalkers recognized in

2013 was the highest number, 21,089, of which 15

resulted in incidences, including the Zushi case.

Among them, there is a reason why the Zushi

incident has been given particular attention.

Immediately after the incident, there emerged the

suspicion that the criminal had prepared for the

crime using a major portal online Q & A bulletin

board for more than one year before committing the

crime. An anonymous suspect who had uploaded the

questions one after another disappeared from the

web after the incident, leaving only a series of

questions. The remaining writing still vividly

conveys how the person gradually obtained the

knowledge related to the incident while keeping the

murderer’s aim secret, such as: how to figure out an

address from a phone number, how to analyse Exif

metadata from a photo, how to uncover a locked

private account on Facebook, how to request a

professional detective search, how to purchase

weapons, and how to move to a site in Zushi.

This case symbolically presents an emerging

ethics agenda for Geographic Information Science,

or GIScience. Although it foretold of the potential

threat of the trend in Geospatial Information

Technology (GIT), for GIT-aided ubiquitous

mapping and cartography (Morita, 2003;

Reichenbacher, 2007; Gartner et al., 2007), for the

next five years on, little attention was paid to the

implication of such a technology-aided incident. In

this paper, the author critically summarizes existing

debates in relevant fields to clarify what was

overlooked and what should be considered.

2 THE RISE OF PGIS AND

INTERNET PRIVACY

Since the 1990s, the possibilities of geospatial

analysis in conjunction with GIS have dramatically

Susuki, K.

A Newly Emerging Ethical Problem in PGIS.

DOI: 10.5220/0006640100220027

In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management (GISTAM 2018), pages 22-27

ISBN: 978-989-758-294-3

increased in the context of consolidation of

geostatistical data, high precision of GPS,

improvement of PC processing capability, and

speeding up of LAN access. Geographers gradually

became aware of the magnitude of the social impacts

of GISystem. GISystem became capable of

analysing and outputting even personal level data

(Miller, 2007). GIT innovation has increased the

necessity of dealing with GIS from an

interdisciplinary science perspective, examining the

consequential social influence of the innovation as

well as the functionality of the system itself. This

has become GIScience.

Since the middle of the 2000s, this situation has

dramatically changed even further. Thanks to the

consolidation of wireless LAN networks, such as

Wi-Fi, which was initially established in 2000,

hardware became capable of providing portable

high-speed Internet access. Moreover, interactive

web services such as Mixi, Facebook, Twitter,

posting bulletin boards, Flickr, etc. were launched

one after another over the course of the decade. As a

result, communication between people far more

casually and unboundedly via the Internet, or so-

called Web 2.0, became a sudden reality. Likewise,

in the case of GIT, when map integration technology

(GeoAPI) was put into practical use on the web,

Google began to provide Street View and Google

Earth continuously in 2006-2007. From then on,

everyone could freely geo-tag and share photos and

texts on the web maps.

One of the most positive aspects stemming

from these technological innovations is the rise of

the Participatory Geographic Information Systems,

PGIS. The evolution has prompted public citizens

who were simply receivers of geographic

information to become senders, sharers, and

communicators of geographic information with use

of Social Networking Services (SNS) and online

mapping devices (Turner, 2006; Crampton, 2010).

Sometimes such grass-roots mappers voluntarily

participate in regional policy planning and local

governance, called Volunteered geographic

information (VGI) (Goodchild, 2007), or bottom-up

GIS in Talen’s (2000) nomenclature. Moreover,

such mappers can utilize GIT in the post-disaster

construction and damage repair process by simply

digitizing satellite imagery of the afflicted areas on

OpenStreetMap to help find ways around severed

roads (Norheim-Hagtun and Meier, 2010).

Cartographers generally interpret the phenomenon

positively, as a people-powered, net-rooted,

undisciplined, alternative and Dionysiac way of

mapping (Crampton, 2010; Kingsbury and Jones,

2009).

On the other hand, it became apparent that there

are potential threats stemming from this advance.

boyd and Ellison’s (2007) review of studies dealt

with online-inherent privacy issues and summarized

these as (1) damaged reputation due to rumors and

gossip; (2) unwanted contact and harassment or

stalking; (3) surveillance-like structures due to

backtracking functions; (4) use of personal data by

third-parties; and (5) hacking and identity theft

(Debatin et al. 2009). Previous studies on SNS

privacy issues mainly focused on ethical questions

involving the remote monitoring of users conducted

by the service provider. Above all, the invasion of

privacy and surveillance of geographic space as an

exercise of public power are subjects of considerable

discussion in GIScience (Armstrong, 2002).

Although the discussion about ubiquitous mapping

is still limited, some scholars coined the term

‘geosurveillance’ (Crampton, 2003) to enable

critical discussion about the potential risks of

privacy infringement through aggregation of users'

attributes and location information collected by

public authority and SNS providers. Although the

development of Information and Communications

Technology (ICT) permits people to share

geographic information in a friendlier manner, users

remain under scrutiny more tightly because of the

geosurveillance (Monmonier, 2002). Dobson and

Fisher (2003) defined the term ‘geoslavery’ as ‘a

practice in which one entity, the master, coercively

or surreptitiously monitors and exerts control over

the physical location of another individual, the slave’

(p. 48). Many scholars metaphorically refer to the

‘big brother’ motif in George Orwell’s famous novel

1984 to describe the power and position of a master

(e.g. Klinkenberg, 2007; Propen, 2005), and

Bentham’s panopticon for the systems and

techniques of monitoring (Dobson and Fisher 2007;

Koskela, 2002). Although many studies have been

extremely conscious of the potential risks of

geosurveillance by public powers, their discussions

regarding privacy infringement at individual levels

lack diversity.

There are many empirical studies on individual

offenders and victims via SNS. For instance, Gross

and Acquisti (2005), one of the classic empirical

studies on SNS profiles, found 89% of users used

their real names on their Facebook profiles, and 61%

used identifiable information in their posts. Jones

and Soltren (2005) found that 62% of student users

did not configure any privacy setting despite the fact

74% of them knew about Facebook privacy options.

A Newly Emerging Ethical Problem in PGIS

They also pointed out that 70% of Facebook users

posted personal information. In other words, they

could not defend their privacy effectively although

they cared about its leakage, in what Barnes (2006)

termed the ‘privacy paradox’. Some other studies

found another rationale: that the tendency to

inadequately protect one’s private information was

the consequence of exhibitionistic motives (McGrath,

2004; Ong et al., 2011). These studies demonstrate

how potential victims are vulnerable and undefended

against anonymous third party offenders on the

Internet, but they do not tell much about the

offenders. Little has been studied regarding the

offenders, except the cyberbullying and

cyberstalking studies that mostly focused on

adolescent students in a criminological context

(Smith et al., 2008; Wolak et al., 2008).

In sum, previous online privacy studies in

GIScience can be summarized as emphasizing the

risks of privacy infringement by public power or

criminological studies through SNS. However, in the

Web 2.0 era, the panoptic one-to-many relationship

becomes the many-surveilling-the-many situation of

what Shilton (2009) described as little brothers and

Rose-Redwood (2006) termed as omnopticon. In

such views, the progress of PGIS may encompass

the participatory panopticon and total loss of privacy

(Whitaker, 1999). Kawaguchi and Kawaguchi

(2012) rephrased the omnopticon as ‘paradoxical

others’ to describe the feeling of discomfort upon

being disclosed on Google Street View.

Liberally interpreted, these views suggest that

an omnoptic mutual surveillance environment

restrains and intermediates the people from deviant

behaviours as a sort of unseen hand of God. But why

do we rule out plausible alternatives?

In this paper, the author brings up two cases for

examining the possibilities not yet discussed in the

preceding contributions: the existence of casual

offenders for pleasure.

Before the Web 2.0 era, most of the people who

could create and manage maps were knowledgeable

experts who generally had educated and internalized

codes of professional ethics. However, in the

ubiquitous mapping circumstance, people can

participate in mapping behaviour far more casually

without being aware that they are in a position of

power to create geographic information, without

knowledge of cartography or ethics. Thus, the

premise that the net-rooted, undisciplined,

alternative and Dionysiac people do what experts

expect of them no longer applies.

3 CASES OF THE CASUAL

OFFENDERS FOR PLEASURE

3.1 Individual Online Peepers

On 20 February 2015, there was a case of murder in

Kanagawa prefecture, Japan. The then-13-year-old

victim had tried to withdraw from the perpetrators’

circle, and was found bound and stabbed to death by

the three juvenile criminals. The case received much

media coverage because of the atrociousness of the

crime that can hardly be attributed to their age.

However, this case became especially

memorable not only because of the savagery, but

also in the context of the present paper. The then-15-

year old podcaster, whose handle name was Noeru

(Noël), somehow located and found the chief

culprit’s family’s house and webcasted it across the

globe. Figure 1 is a screenshot of the delivered

movie (now deleted) showing a symbolic

composition of a journalist holding out a

microphone to a nameless boy as seen from his

behind. The figure demonstrates that even a boy

goes toe-to-toe with professional media in terms of

competence for information transmission. Needless

to say, Noeru (and other mappers) could determine a

location by simply specifying aggregated place

names and utilizing Google Street View to find the

same exterior appearance of the home broadcasted

by the mass media to detect the exact target location

(termed ‘dataveillance’ by Clarke, 1988). Why

would the non-involved boy do this? It is

ratiocinative to consider his aspiring to fame and

increased advertisement revenue, even if he becomes

seen as an online ‘weirdo’.

Figure 1: A screenshot of the podcasted movie

(http://www.afreecatv.jp/noeru) *now deleted.

GISTAM 2018 - 4th International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management

3.2 Private Sanctions and Collective

Droves

On 15 May 2012 in Hachioji, Tokyo, an elementary

school child was on his way home from school.

Suddenly, two junior high school students

surrounded him, while making a visual recording

with a cell phone. The two adolescents found a

pretext for quarrelling with the boy, causing him to

move backward and whimper in fear. The

adolescents then uploaded the movie file on one of

the adolescent’s YouTube account for kicks

(Yomiuri Online, 21 July 2017).

Immediately after the upload, the URL was

disseminated on the Internet by SNS, and appeared

on the famous online bulletin board 2channel with

fusillade of accusations. An anonymous person

promptly created a portal site with using @wiki, a

free rental wiki maintained by a limited liability

company, Atfreaks (Figure 2). The website served as

a ‘traffic cop’, directing thousands of seekers to the

appropriate information. As the sub-domain name

/dqntokutei/ eloquently shows, the creator of the

domain cared less about right or wrong but rather to

tokutei (identify) the dqn (an argot for ‘homeboys’)

who deserved to be sanctioned.

Figure 2: The top page screenshot of the promptly created

wiki (https://www34.atwiki.jp/dqntokutei/).

Subsequently, thousands of Internet users

(mainly consisting of 2channel viewers) voluntarily

began Googling for information about the captured

location, as well as analysing the past uploaded files

on the YouTube account. The power of collective

intelligence was used to pinpoint the filmed location

before long, by scoping out distinctive landmarks

captured in the setting and comparing them with

images on Google Street View. The school uniform

of the perpetrators also revealed the school they

attended. Likewise, some of the amateur

investigators examined the contents of past uploaded

movies and found that the uploaders' faces and their

neighbourhoods were visible in some of the files.

These online droves dataveillanced all information

published online, found two nameless targets, and

privately sanctioned through complaint calls to the

schools and police stations. Five years on from this

initial burst of enthusiasm, the portal site remains on

the Internet, exposing the faces and locations of

involved individuals to the public gaze.

4 CONCLUDING REMARKS

In 1495 A.D., in medieval Germany, Ewiger

Landfriede passed by Maximilian I, German king

and emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, prohibited

Fehde (the duel) as a self-help right to take

vengeance. This was the first time in European

history when a Reichskammergericht, the Supreme

Court, was established in a related move (Jackson,

1994). As this event clearly demonstrates, the

modern concept of law and justice could not be

made possible without consignment of individual

rights of vengeance to the public power. Five

hundred and a few decades on, an overwhelming

innovation in GIT is prompting the resurgence of

this pre-modern principle in a way too modernized

figure.

The recently realized ubiquitous mapping based

on Web 2.0 circumstances is making it an open

possibility for people to create and use geographic

information anywhere and at any time, and without

advanced map-use skills (Gartner et al., 2007).

However, as the meaning of the word illustrates,

ubiquitous stands for being omnipresent, like air,

health, and water, all largely taken for granted.

In Latin, an antonym for ubiquitous is

absconditus, signifying hidden, hard to see or to

grasp (Lewis, 1890). Although air is everywhere, its

existence is largely overlooked because of its

ubiquitous nature. Likewise, in a ubiquitous

mapping situation, its presence becomes very hard to

see or to grasp, especially for people not educated

and trained to ‘see’ it. As the examples in this study

demonstrate, technological advances also enable

people to participate by nonchalantly lowering the

technical, intelligential, and ethical barriers.

For the time being, PGIS studies mainly take a

look at the sunny side of the progress in GIT.

A Newly Emerging Ethical Problem in PGIS

Relevant studies on online ethics place undue

reliance on spontaneously arising equilibrium

innervated by mutual surveillance among the people

involved (Rose-Redwood, 2006; Kawaguchi and

Kawaguchi, 2012). However, this view of this

exponential technological advance is over-optimistic

and ingenuous. GIS is only a device and tool. As the

Zushi murder case at the beginning of this article

shows, people can utilize the new technologies both

in good ways and bad. Further studies are clearly

essential to establish geographic information ethics

from a collaboration of relevant fields such as

information ethics, comparative jurisprudence,

geographical education as well as GIScience for

offering a clear-cut answer to this newly emerging

problem.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant

Number JP17H00839. Some parts of this article are

based on the following conference presentations

conducted by the author: the 63rd Annual

Conference of The Japanese Society for Ethics in

2012, the Kyoto Collegium for Bioethics in 2014,

the conferences of the Association of Japanese

Geographers in 2014 and 2015, and a keynote

speech at Hokuriku Geo-Spatial Forum 2017.

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A Newly Emerging Ethical Problem in PGIS