I'm pleased to be here and to learn about geographic information systems. As scientists we tend to be rewarded for specialization, often showing how things that seem to be similar are actually internally varied. But today I speak as a generalist who seeks commonalities across information technologies that appear very different.

I found a number of yesterday's presentations to be intellectually provocative, others I found simply to be unintentionally emotionally provocative. In particular, some of the ideas that were expressed regarding privacy and autonomy were uncritical and undifferentiated in their view of government and the private sector. They ignored the complexity and the multiple dimensions, types and consequences of privacy and autonomy. I found some of the papers to be unwarranted in their optimism and boosterism. But I'm grateful even to these presenters because they make clear the importance of being self-reflexive and examining our own taken for granted assumptions. While sitting ducks may offer a cheap shot, they are at least a sure thing.

One speaker argued that geographers should stay spatially located and concrete. But it is also vital that we locate our empirical observations within a broader intellectual context. That is the spirit in which I'm offering these observations.

The attached cartoon illustrates an important point. In it we see a Woody Allen and a Diane Keaton figure. They are at the circus, and the Diane Keaton figure says "I always wonder how they get all those clowns into one little car". And the Woody Allen figure says, "that's the difference between us... I always wonder why."

We need to ask not only the "how" question of practitioners and applied scientists, but "why". "Why" refers not only to the causes of behavior but to goals and values and impacts.

The emphasis on the "how" question can be seen in the statement on the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis that we all received. The second paragraph states "NCGIA research gives particular emphasis to removing the impediments which have stood in the way of GIS being adopted for even more widespread use and benefit to society and the environment."

As an independent academic I would prefer to start with questions rather than with answers. That statement substitutes an answer for a question. An alternative approach would be to ask "What are the advantages and disadvantages of various types and uses of GIS data? When should we seek more widespread use? Are there time when we should encourage less or no use? Rather than starting with an assumption about the need to remove impediments, are there times when we should seek to erect them?

2. TECHNO-FALLACIES OF THE INFORMATION AGE

I will discuss a limited number of what I call tarnished silver bullet techno-fallacies for the information age. These were not developed with GIS in mind, but I think they apply. They deal more generally with the question of extractive technologies, --technologies for gathering personal information, often without the individual's consent or knowledge (Marx, forthcoming)

As an ethnographer in watching and listening to the rhetorics around information technology, I often hear things that simply sound wrong to me, much as a musician hears things that are off key. Let me offer a sampling of observations that I call techno-fallacies:

• "Turn the technology loose and let the benefits flow".

• "Do away with the human interface".

• "When you choose to make a phone call, you are consenting to have your telephone number released".

• "Only the computer sees it."

• "Those of us who are involved in consumer marketing are the best agents for protecting the consumer's privacy".

• "That's never happened".

• "The public interest is whatever the public is interested in watching".

• "There's no law against this".

• "The technology is neutral".

The fallacies to be discussed differ in kind --some can be shown to be empirically false or logically suspect, and hence if the argument is correct (whether factually or logically), persons of diverse political perspectives can agree that they are fallacious. Others are normative fallacies and will be rejected only when there is agreement about the values, or value priorities on which they are based. But even here, I think the values that I am expressing are central to American and western society.

Table I lists the techno-fallacies. In the brief time here I will comment on only some of them.

The basic idea of the first fallacy is that if you're concerned about privacy or protecting information, it's because you have something to hide.

The fallacy of the free lunch or painless dentistry, a frequent assumption of the techno-boosters, is that a technical change will involve only benefits and no costs. Therefore it must be adopted since it is basically free. Of course this is nonsense ---there are no free meals and your teeth may hurt when the Novocain wears off. If nothing else a given use of resources involves forgone opportunity costs. The resources might have been used for some other purpose.

The fallacy of quantification is particularly important in policy conferences such as this which are usually dominated by lawyers and economists. it's important to realize that there are values that can't be measured by bottom lines and market-driven phenomena.

The fallacy of the short run speaks for itself. There's a wonderful story about a farmer who was having a hard time making ends meet. Someone advised him to feed his animals less, so he cut down their feed by 25%. It worked --he saved a lot of money. He then said "hey, this is great, I'm going to cut their feed in half" and he saved even more money. And of course he kept on reducing their feed and you know what happened.

The legalistic fallacy is often expressed by advocates of a technology. The basic idea is that if you have a legal right to do something, it therefore must be the right thing to do. But we ought to start with the law and not stop with it. The fact that a practice is legal, (sometimes because it is too new to have resulted in restrictive legislation, or because power differentials prevent that), does not mean that it is right or wise.

The pragmatic or efficiency fallacy holds that the most important thing is whether or not the technology gets the job done. But there is more to collective life than pragmatism. Certainly given scarce resources and a scientific ethos, we must ask that question. But again an affirmative answer shouldn't lead to the automatic unleashing of the technology and the overruling of other competing values. Values that are difficult to measure rarely receive adequate attention at conferences which are inspired by a particular innovation or problem. Pragmatism must be weighed along side of other values such as fairness, equity, and the external costs imposed on third parties.

The fallacy of the lowest common denominator morality, assumes that if your side doesn't use the technology, your opponents will, giving them an unfair advantage.

A fallacy which was present in many of yesterday's presentations is to assume that personal information (whether deduced from broader aggregate data or collected from a particular individual) is simply another commodity. It is believed that if you are able to gain access to the data, that it's yours to do whatever you want with it. But I think many of us feel that personal information has a special quality, something that's almost sacred. It is the not the same as raw materials or office furniture.

There's the fallacy of assuming that the facts are obvious givens which speak for themselves. But the "facts" are socially generated and interpreted. Any human knowledge, no matter how powerful and useful, is always abstracted out and partial. It is only a sample or a fraction of what might be attended to. Alternative information or a fuller picture might suggest a different meaning. To adequately interpret, we need a context and a broader picture. When you apply acontextual data to human beings you run terrible risks of error and injustice in particular cases (although in the abstract the system may be rational).

Now to deal with broader context of course you have to have more data and that requires more money. This leads to another (and in some ways opposed fallacy) that if some is good, more is better. This equation of bigger with better is particularly strong in the United States. It is no doubt related to capitalism and has a gender component. It is simply not necessarily true that if only we spend more money and create more powerful technologies that things will improve. There are issues of scale and threshold, not to mention the hubris of thinking that terribly complex problems will always yield to technical solutions. There's nothing inherently good or bad about the increased power of a technology. Our judgments must flow from analysis not from the fact that a tool exists, or might exist. In this sense technology differs greatly from artistic expression.

A fallacy expressed yesterday was that just because privacy expectations are historically determined and relative, that they have to become weaker as technology becomes more powerful. This is implicit in some views of the Supreme Court regarding the meaning of reasonable expectations of privacy. A related point is that because privacy as we know it in our complex, industrial democratic society is a historically new phenomena not experienced, or perhaps even valued, by much of the world's population, that it is not important.

There is the populist fallacy of assuming that the public knows best. There is the opposite fallacy that elites know best. There is the fallacy that the means will never determine the end. It has been said that to a person with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. Yet a major critique of industrial society is that means increasingly determine ends. if I made my living doing what many of you do, perhaps I would not see this as a danger, at least for the technology I advocated. Yet it is vital for civilization (if not always for self or organizational interests), that we start with goals and ask what do we want to accomplish, instead of starting with a tool and asking how can I apply it.

There is the dangerous fallacy of believing that because it's possible to successfully skate on thin ice, it's acceptable to do so. Of course with GIS systems that are new, there are not many publicly known examples of undesirable consequences. A standard response to social critics is "OK, it could happen, but so far its hypothetical." Foresight is better than hindsight, even if it sometimes errors in its conservatism. There was a time when Three Mile Island and the oil spill in Alaska had not happened as well. It may be fun to skate on thin ice and an adventure, but it's a dumb thing to do.

There is the fallacy of permanent victory. Here we have the assumption that environments, especially those where there are conflicts of interest, are passive rather than reactive. But we know that isn't the case.

There is the danger of delegating decision-making authority to a machine. IT is also often assumed that technology is necessarily good because its new, that you can't stop progress and if we can do something we should. I study social control and one of my favorite quotes is from a police chief, who said "if we have the technology, why not use it?" That is a frightening assertion absent a wide ranging consideration of multiple consequence. Such statements ought to be approach as empirical and ethical questions and not unreflectively accepted as conclusions.

There's a very important fallacy of thinking that the only meaning of the technology is in its application. Of course we have to be concrete, we have to think about whether or not the technology will work. But technologies involve social and human meanings and historical references. The meaning of a technology does not lie only in its ostensible use. Technologies also have symbolic meanings. Police dogs can be an efficient crowd control device. Yet if you were the police chief in Birmingham, Alabama, would you use dogs for crowd control?

There is the fallacy of not considering issues of precedent. This assumes that "we will just do this one time and never again." And finally there is the fallacy of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, instead of looking for icebergs. The problem here is looking at superficial issues, or at symptoms, rather than at deeper causes.

I realize that some of my assumptions could be turned around and called fallacies (or worse). Someone holding different values might come up with a different list including items such as "the fallacy of listening to academics who make broad generalizations." The fallacies also differ in seriousness and some are in conflict. My basic point is not to argue strenuously for this particular list, but to argue for the importance of undertaking a critical examination of the assumptions that we make about new information technologies whether this involves GIS, drug testing, electronic location monitoring, DNA predictions, or computer matching and profiling. In doing this we need humility in the face of complex and interdependent problems.

3. PRIVACY PROTECTION PRINCIPLES

Almost everyone in this business has a list of principles. There is nothing particularly original about those in table 2. It is unrealistic to have principles which apply equally in all contexts and across all technologies. To argue that we would have to be so general as to be vapid, or simply too rigid. Yet I think these principles must be weighed when we consider public policy with respect to information technology.

Let me conclude with a quote from Justice William O. Douglas. He argued that the protection of our basic values is not self-executing. He states "As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air, however slight lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness." We can as well argue that we are in a sunrise zone, that we must be aware of change in the air in order to ensure that we all profit from the sunshine. But for this to happen the technology must be bounded by increased public awareness, responsible corporate and governmental behavior, and new laws and policy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This paper draws from and expands upon G. Marx, "Technology and Privacy", The World and I, Sept. 1990 and "No Soul in the New Machine: Techno-Fallacies in the Electronic Monitoring Movement" (with R. Corbett), Justice Quarterly, Sept. 1991.

REFERENCES

Marx, G. Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology, book based on Duke University-American Sociological Association Jensen Lectures, forthcoming.

Table 1 Some Techno-Fallacies of the Information Age

1) THE FALLACY OF IMMANENT DEVELOPMENT AND USE WHICH HOLDS THAT IF A TECHNOLOGY CAN BE DEVELOPED IT SHOULD BE, AND IF IT IS DEVELOPED ITS USE CAN NOT BE STOPPED

2) THE FALLACY THAT GREATER EXPENDITURES AND MORE POWERFUL TECHNOLOGY WILL CONTINUALLY YIELD BENEFITS IN A LINEAR FASHION

3) THE FALLACY THAT PRAGMATISM AND/OR EFFICIENCY SHOULD AUTOMATICALLY OVERRULE OTHER VALUES SUCH AS FAIRNESS, EQUITY, AND EXTERNAL COSTS IMPOSED ON THIRD PARTIES

4) THE FALLACY OF THINKING THAT THE MEANING OF A TECHNOLOGY LIES ONLY IN ITS PRACTICALITY OR MATERIAL ASPECTS AND NOT IN ITS SOCIAL SYMBOLISM AND HISTORICAL REFERENTS

5) THE FALLACY THAT THE MEANS WILL NEVER DETERMINE THE END (OR IF YOU CAN'T FIX THE REAL PROBLEM FIX WHATEVER THE TECHNOLOGY PERMITS YOU TO FIX)

6) THE FALLACY OF THE FREE LUNCH OR PAINLESS DENTISTRY

7) THE FALLACY OF PERFECT CONTAINMENT OR NON-ESCALATION (OR THE FRANKENSTEINIAN FALLACY THAT TECHNOLOGY WILL ALWAYS REMAIN THE SOLUTION RATHER THAN BECOME THE PROBLEM)

8) THE FALLACY OF THINKING THAT A GIVEN, CAREFULLY CIRCUMSCRIBED CHANGE WILL NOT CREATE A PRECEDENT

9) THE FALLACY OF TECHNICAL NEUTRALITY

10) THE FALLACY OF SOCIETAL CONSENSUS AND HOMOGENEITY IN WHICH IT IS ASSUMED THAT CONFLICTS AND DIVISIONS ARE NON-EXISTENT AND WHAT'S GOOD FOR THOSE WITH ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL POWER IS NECESSARILY GOOD FOR EVERYONE ELSE)

11) THE FALLACY OF IMPLIED CONSENT AND FREE CHOICE

12) THE FALLACY OF QUANTIFICATION

13) THE FALLACY OF THE SHORT RUN

14) THE LEGALISTIC FALLACY THAT JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE A LEGAL RIGHT TO DO SOMETHING IT'S THE RIGHT THING TO DO

15) THE TECHNOCRATIC FALLACY THAT THE EXPERTS ALWAYS KNOW WHAT IS BEST

16) THE POPULIST FALLACY THAT THE PEOPLE ALWAYS KNOW WHAT IS BEST

17) THE FALLACY OF LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR MORALITY IN WHICH IF THE COMPETITION OR OTHERS PUSH MORAL LIMITS, YOU ARE JUSTIFIED IN DOING THE SAME

18) THE FALLACY OF PERMANENT VICTORY

19) THE FALLACY OF THE 100% FAIL-SAFE SYSTEM

20) THE FALLACY OF DELEGATING DECISION MAKING AUTHORITY TO THE MACHINE

21) THE FALLACY OF A PASSIVE, NON-REACTIVE ENVIRONMENT

22) THE FALLACY OF BELIEVING THAT BECAUSE IT IS POSSIBLE TO SUCCESSFULLY SKATE ON THIN ICE, THAT IT IS ACCEPTABLE TO DO SO

23) THE FALLACY OF ASSUMING THAT IF A CRITIC QUESTIONS THE MEANS HE OR SHE MUST ALSO BE AGAINST THE ENDS.

the following apply particularly to information technologies:

24) THE FALLACY OF ASSUMING THAT ONLY THE GUILTY HAVE TO FEAR THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTRUSIVE TECHNOLOGY (OR IF YOU'VE DONE NOTHING WRONG YOU HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE).

25) THE FALLACY OF ASSUMING THAT PERSONAL INFORMATION ON CUSTOMERS, CLIENTS AND CASES IN THE POSSESSION OF A COMPANY IS JUST ANOTHER KIND OF PROPERTY TO BE BOUGHT AND SOLD THE SAME AS OFFICE FURNITURE OR RAW MATERIALS

26) THE FALLACY OF ASSUMING THAT DATA ARE SIMPLY THERE WAITING TO BE DELIVERED OR PLUCKED FROM THE DATA TREE (THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL FACTORS INVOLVED IN COLLECTION/CONSTRUCTION ARE NOT SEEN)

27) THE FALLACY THAT THE FACTS SPEAK FOR/PRODUCE THEMSELVES

28) THE FALLACY OF ASSUMING THAT BECAUSE OUR PRIVACY EXPECTATIONS ARE HISTORICALLY DETERMINED AND RELATIVE, THEY MUST NECESSARILY BECOME WEAKER AS TECHNOLOGY BECOMES MORE POWERFUL.

29) THE FALLACY THAT IF A VALUE SUCH AS PRIVACY IS RELATIVELY NEW OR NEW IN FORM, OR APPLIES TO ONLY A FRACTION OF THE WORLD'S POPULATION, IT CAN'T BE VERY IMPORTANT

and finally a more general fallacy:

30) THE FALLACY OF RE-ARRANGING THE DECK CHAIRS ON THE TITANIC INSTEAD OF LOOKING FOR ICEBERGS (OR RESPONDING TO AN OVERFLOWING BATH TUB BY MOPPING THE FLOOR INSTEAD OF TURNING OFF THE FAUCET)

1. INFORMED AND CONSENTING SUBJECTS
2. MINIMIZATION
3. RESTORATION
4. SAFETY NET/EQUITY
5. TIMELINESS, VALIDITY, RELEVANCE OF DATA
6. JOINT OWNERSHIP OF TRANSACTIONAL DATA
7. UNITARY USAGE AND NON-MIGRATION OF DATA
8. CONSISTENCY
9. SUBJECT INVOLVEMENT IN STANDARD SETTING
10. RECIPROCITY
11. INSPECTIONS
12. CORRECTION-COMMENTARY PROCEDURES
13. DATA SECURITY
14. CONFIDENTIALITY AND ANONYMITY WHERE APPROPRIATE
15. REDRESS
16. HUMAN REVIEW OF MACHINE DECISIONS