ETHICS
Case Studies

Download the Case Studies

• Bear Baiting Should precise locations of controversial hunting stations be public information?
• Caribou Migration Routes A GIS analyst is asked to exclude pertinent data from maps prepared for a public hearing.
• Collateral Damage Mapping A geospatial intelligence analyst predicts the civilian casualties likely to be caused by a pre-emptive missile attack.
• Cutting Corners on Redistricting Election mapping consultants propose to omit data from GIS analyses to cut costs and win a contract with a newly-formed Independent Election Commission.
• Energy Production and Protected Whales Should new lease blocks for oil and gas wells be established in a rare whale’s habitat in the Gulf of Mexico?
• Ethical Minefield Should a surveying and mapping crew chief pay a bribe to acquire data needed to conduct field reconnaissance safely?
• E-911 Contract Conflict of Interest A municipal GIS manager troubled by what appears to be a conflict of interest considers filing a formal ethics complaint.
• Flood Insurance Mapping Confronted with increasing flood risk in her region, how can a floodplain manager reconcile conflicting obligations to her employer and her constituents?
• Government Employee and the Press A member of the press asks a government employee to leak the results of a GIS analysis about a controversial wild land fire.
• Low-level Radioactive Waste Siting Map A map masks potentially suitable sites for low-level radioactive waste storage facility.
• Mapping Muslim Neighborhoods A police department’s plan to map potential terrorist enclaves brings charges of racial profiling.
• Misleading Satellite Data Contract A sales representative is expected to withhold information that could affect availability of a data product.
• Politics Meets Policy in Groundwater Permitting A Permitting Coordinator/GIS Analyst is pressured to approve an application for a high-production well despite disqualifying district rules.
• Privacy and Planning A GIS professional considers filing an ethics complaint about lax protection of the confidentiality of a sensitive database.
• Proprietary Software in an Emergency Too few software licenses are available in the aftermath of a tsunami.
• Public Access to Government Data A governmental agency’s need to recoup user fees conflicts with a public records law.
• Sharing Alpha Software An entrepreneurial GIS programmer is tempted to use a friend’s code to win a lucrative contract.
• Social Trails and Border Security A student intern has misgivings about sharing location data about trails used by illegal immigrants with U.S. Border Patrol.
• Submarine Crashes into Uncharted Seamount A nuclear submarine’s crash into an uncharted seamount raises ethical issues for Navy training personnel.
• Tidal Wetland Mapping A scope of work statement and established mapping procedures prevent a GIS analyst from adding wetlands to a conservation database.
• Tracking Mobile Phones in Mobility Research Researchers track mobile phone users’ movements to derive predictive models of human mobility.

Codes of Ethics

• URISA (now Geospatial Professionals Network) GIS Code of Ethics
• GIS Certification Institute Rules of Conduct
• Ethical GEO and Benchmark Locus Charter
• American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Code of Ethics

How to Write and Analyze Case Studies

For an in-depth discussion of the development and use of ethics case studies in geospatial education, see DiBiase, D. (2025). Practical Geospatial Ethics: Concerns, Codes, and Cases. Cartographic Perspectives 105. https://doi.org/10.14714/CP105.1935

For a briefer introduction to GIS ethics, see DiBiase, D. (2017). Professional and Practical Ethics of GIS&T. The Geographic Information Science & Technology Body of Knowledge (2nd Quarter 2017 Edition), John P. Wilson (ed.). doi: 10.22224/gistbok/2017.2.2

Related Case Study Collections

• Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society (2016) Data Ethics Case Studies.
• Princeton Dialogues on AI and Ethics (2021). Case Study PDFs. Princeton University.
• http://computingcases.org/