麻豆传媒

Spying With Maps by Mark Monmonier, University of Chicago Press, $27.50, ISBN 0226534278

PARTY-throwing people often send out maps so guests can find their way to the fun. In this fascinating book on mapping, Mark Monmonier deals with the other side of the coin: locational privacy, the desire or right to stay off the map to escape what he calls 鈥渄ataveillance鈥�.

Although Monmonier deals with such obvious privacy issues as the increasingly ubiquitous video camera, he is even more interested in the linked databases that help governments, police forces, banks and marketing firms keep tabs on us all.

In this short, clever book 鈥� illustrated with dozens of maps, of course 鈥� Monmonier manages to cover the history of spy satellites, aerial photography for agriculture, the hot topic of using the Web and maps to track sex offenders, and much more. In each case, he shows the advantages created by cameras and computers, and the downside. So while traffic management software speeds drivers through crowded cities by timing the lights in real time, the same system can now give you a speeding ticket, and tomorrow it could record each trip you take. And while epidemiologists love maps that enable them to track foot-and-mouth disease, unless health data is encrypted or blurred, it can enable people to find out which of their neighbours has AIDS.

Monmonier is refreshingly straightforward about his own research and life in Spying With Maps. For starters, he provides his address.