Techno-ethics
A Today Show story this morning focused on the use of Google Earth and how soldiers in Iraq were shocked to see how it provided a fairly accurate rendering of an active base there.
For the past 20 years, the field of bioethics has been evolving to answer the question of "just because we can do something, does that mean we should do it?". Obviously, with issues like human cloning the pervasive answer has been "of course not".
Now it seems that technologists have to begin to explore the same issues and do it from a similar "philosophy-based" approach. Do peer networks make it OK to illegally traffic intellectual property? Should advanced data mining or text mining techniques be allowed to move forward even if they violate individual privacy rights?
The Google Earth question is an interesting one. In some ways, it reminds me of a conversation I overheard at a supermarket checkout about 3 years ago. Two women (I believe it was a mother and daughter) were talking about the Internet. The older one, roughly 60'ish, said that her son had shown her how he can enter her address on the computer and get a set of directions of how to get to her house. Her comment was "that's very scary". My thoughts, of course, were that if you know the location you are going to, the technology to find that location has been around for many years - maps were initally developed by the Babylonians around 2500 BC.
At the same time, I think that it is reasonable for technology providers to recognize potential pitfalls of their technologies and be willing to adapt them for the "greater good". In this case, it seems reasonable to me that if the DoD were to provide Google with certain lats and longs, that they should be willing to place limitations on views for those locations - either generating fuzzy pictures or simply restricting the user's ability to zoom at that level.
Just as we place limitations on data mining for law enforcement or intelligence (John Poindexter's infamous TIA project), we can balance the desires of commercial users with the need to protect our armed forces during active war efforts.
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