Ethical and Legal Issues Affecting Geospatial Sciences and Advances in Smart Land Management

Crowdsourcing applications, open applications and platforms on internet, extensive functionalities of smart phones, technologies of blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning and new types of hardware, such as UAVs and drones, have enhanced the way in which organisations and individuals can collect and store geospatial data (Altaweel, 2021). The resultant geospatial data are, however, not (value-) neutral. Their shape, form, process of collection, manner of storage, type of content, access and transparency are a result of epistemic choices (de Vries, 2008) and historical technological contingencies (Pfeffer and Georgiadou, 2019). These contingencies include political and contextual justifications to start compiling the information and technological choices, which were available at this specific time of the choice to compile. Being value-laden, both ethical and legal issues may arise. Ethical dilemmas relate to moral values. Morality relates to the question of what is good and bad, right or wrong and appropriate or non-appropriate behaviour. Since values are cultural and context dependent, one could argue that they may not be universal or global or that there may be many variations of what is right or wrong. Since geospatial information has global features, simply because it relates to any location on earth, there needs to be some global framework of when, how, where geospatial information can be constructed, sensed, used, adapted, reused, shared, visualised and/or distributed. A choice in any of these courses of geospatial action may have certain ramifications for individuals, communities, relations, networks or entire societies. Ramifications may be lack of trust in the geospatial information sources, mistakes and misuse as a result of wrong or untrusted geoinformation products, and financial or legal claims as a consequence of illegal or non-agreed geospatial information services.