Demonstrating the potential for covert policing in the community: five stakeholder scenarios (original) (raw)
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Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI EA '16, 2016
Surveillance, literally the 'close watching over' of a person or a group, was historically carried out to monitor adversaries and criminals. The digital era of sensor-rich, connected devices means that new forms of everyday surveillance-what some are calling 'dataveillance'-are emerging. These are changing the power structures that link people, businesses and governments. In this multidisciplinary, one day workshop, we seek to rethink and understand everyday surveillance practices, asking: what are new forms of surveillance that accompany developments in Big Data and the emerging Internet of Things; what are the anticipated and unanticipated effects of a surveillance culture; how does surveillance need to be (re)configured in order to empower the citizen or contribute to social good? We will ask who 'owns' the data that arises from these everyday acts of surveillance and what can result from rethinking these ownership models. We will consider the role and place of research in surveillance data collection and analysis.
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Digital technologies have given rise to increased occurrences of self-surveillance and forms of 'virtual vigilantism'. This has progressed from key moments such as the video recording of the Rodney King incident, to recording human rights abuses, to citizen grassroots surveillance. From this has emerged the phenomenon known as citizen journalism where recent urban crises have been recorded on mobile phones by the individuals involved. Also on the increase are forms of mob vigilantism, or 'participatory panopticon'; examples here include phone images spread over the Internet as severe forms of 'community punishment'. I argue that these unmediated forms of bottom-up surveillance-sousveillance-show the early signs of a new type of civil responsibility that stands unregulated and without restraint. This paper addresses the issues of increased individualised self-surveillance and asks whether this is the consequence of a personalised resistance to an ever increasing surveillance society.
2011
We are living in exponential times: technology is ubiquitous, the boundaries of on-line off-line are becoming undistinguishable, and geographical distances no longer constrict our activities. What will be, and what are, the consequences of existing in a technologically saturated environment? From the moment of conception, the data trail begins, our personas recorded on databases, social networking sites and CCTV as we go about our everyday lives. What impact does such amassment of data have on society, communities and ...
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Journal of Communication, 2011
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This article offers a conceptualization of ''participation'' in relation to surveillance practices. Our aim is to introduce an analytical platform allowing for a non-normative, yet, nuanced understanding of surveillance. The development of an analytical concept of participation in relation to surveillance is at least partially made relevant by a wide range of new surveillance technologies and practices relating to smartphones, social network sites and location sharing. In the article, we introduce and analyze three empirical examples to follow traces of participation in a broad range of everyday surveillance spaces: sports-focused tracking devices and online communities, parental surveillance and CCTV. We conclude that surveillance and its effects is always a matter of how heterogeneous actors are aligned, how their participation is negotiated and how their intentions and actions are translated. Thus, an important task for surveillance scholars is not only to identify participatory surveillance as a specific iteration of surveillance. Rather, the project is to analyze participation in any given situation of surveillance and this includes a careful attention to the ways in which participation is established, maintained and negotiated.
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Surveillance has become a crucial component of all environments informed or enabled by ICTs. Equally, almost all surveillance practices in technologically 'advanced' societies are enhanced and amplified by ICTs. Surveillance is understood as any focused attention to personal details for the purposes of influence, management, or control. Thus in addition to those who may be 'suspects' (because of alleged offences), ordinary persons in everyday lifeworkers, consumers, citizens, travellers --find that their personal data are of interest to others. Agencies process personal data in order to calculate risks or to predict opportunities, classifying and profiling their records routinely. While everyday life may thus seem less 'private', and ordinary people may feel that they are more vulnerable to intrusion, the use of searchable databases for categorizing and profiling means that deeper questions of power are involved. Life chances and choices are affected -sometimes negatively -by the judgments made on the basis of concatenated data, which means that such surveillance is implicated in basic questions of social justice, to do with access, risk distribution and freedom. There is increased need for ethics and politics of information in an era of intensifying surveillance.