Geo spatial data and its effects on you

Geospatial information is combining with the internet at a furious pace. Information such as E government, transportation tracking, shipping tracking, weather, crime and traffic are all a few clicks away on the internet. Most of this technology was developed by the government during the Cold War. After the Soviet Union fell this technology was applied for commercial reasons.

E government is the so called stream lining of the paper work process of the government. Rather than having to fill out paper forms and then mail them in you can simply log on to the various government sites and fill in the forms on line and submit them. The government claims this to be a more efficient way to do business. While this may be true we all hear on a regular basis of hackers accessing peoples personal information through computer data bases. Do we really need to allow even more sensitive information to be available to these hackers? Also the government collects data, such as the census, and uses that information to create maps to so trends. This information again is readily available to anyone. Was this the intent of the census when it was first developed?

Air travel and package delivery is another area that is easily tracked on line. Air travel can show you current flights and whether or not those flights are delayed and for how long. This virtually eliminates the days of finding out after you get to the airport that your flight is delayed three hours or worse yet that it has been cancelled. Also if you place an order for something you can receive a tracking number and look up the status of your package telling you where it is and its estimated delivery time. Most of these styles of tracking are not real time for security reasons. If you ask me it's just a matter of time before the industry goes to real time tracking. I'm sure the terrorists of the world will greatly appreciate real time flight plans.

Being that I'm in law enforcement I can see the benefits of crime mapping. This helps identify hot spots for crime and then deploy your resources appropriately to those hot spots to mitigate the crime. While on its face this seems great what happens to the people living in those hot spots. They are labeled as living in bad neighborhoods and are associated with the criminals in that area. This will also keep people from moving into those neighborhoods because of the crime rate. This is a spin off of the Broken Windows Theory.

Sex offenders living in a neighborhood is information that is readily available by law. While I'm in total agreement with the law this does create a lot of problems. For instance if you are looking to move to a certain area in a town and you find out a sex offender resides in that area it would most likely keep you from moving there. Also people who are currently residing in a neighborhood and discover exactly where a sex offender is residing in that neighborhood could lead to violence in trying to force the sex offender out of the neighborhood.

When it comes to locating your residence on sites such as Google Earth again while helpful in some ways it is also hurtful in others. If you are trying to sell your house for instance you can put all of the information on the internet and you can see your house and describe the features to the house. What happens if someone is looking to break into houses? A thief could find out your entire floor plan as well as looking at the GE images to determine how close house are or how busy the street is to aid in letting them target you for a future crime.

One of the better uses of mapping is the weather. We have seen hurricanes, for example, cause thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in damage. The ability for people to see the hurricanes in real time on the internet and to see the modeling of the track that the storm could take may save thousands of lives. The problem with this technology is not everyone can afford a computer or internet access.

As you can see geospatial information seems like it is becoming a necessary evil. What needs to happen is to determine whether or not the benefits out way the negatives. I believe that they do because are lives are made much easier by these new technologies.