Surveillance and Society

Hong Kong.
The next session at The Internet Turning 40 starts with a presentation by David Lyon, on surveillance technologies. He begins by noting a recent Simpsons episode that addressed surveillance (usually a sure sign that this is now an issue of popular discussion) and portrayed subversive resistance against such technologies. Surveillance has been concerned traditionally with visual observation, but this is now only the tip of the iceberg; additionally, today it is no longer only government institutions which engage in surveillance, and this is reducing the amount of physical or informational space which still remains surveillance-free.

The idea that 'if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear' is a pernicious lie, David says - as is the understanding that the mundane details we may share on Facebook and elsewhere are irrelevant. Internet technologies and surveillance technologies are now closely intertwined - and any information society is also automatically a surveillance society (though this is not necessarily an inherently bad thing).

Ubiquitous computing lends itself especially directly to surveillance - the wired cities currently being developed (with myriad sensors to respond to inhabitants moving through the space) may be very user-friendly, but also generate a vast amount of data about citizens, which may be processed to create very details pictures about their personal habits.

Additionally, security pressures following the 11 September 2001 attacks led to greater surveillance measures - and interestingly, a key field which influenced the develop of such measures was marketing: customer relationship management techniques which were already in use in marketing to create detailed consumer profiles were able to be quickly and easily adapted for state security purposes.

Some suggest that we are now entering a surveillance society - a society which depends on processing personal data about citizens to better organise government services and initiatives -, and the threat here is that there is a continuing function and mission creep which gradually expands the utilisation of surveillance, in a constant quest for more and more comprehensive information.

The large databases of information which emerge from this are used to create detailed profiles of citizens, and apparently innocuous data points (preferences for specific consumer products, for example) are now used to as predictors of particular behaviours. Additionally, major large-scale events (political summits, sporting events) are used as testing beds for new security and surveillance measures.

Increasingly, the information available from these measures may affect citizens' life chances - a new form of social sorting of citizens into 'liquid classes' may be emerging here.

Technorati : Internet Turning 40, identity, privacy, society, surveillance, ubiquitous computing
Del.icio.us : Internet Turning 40, identity, privacy, society, surveillance, ubiquitous computing