This paper presents some results of a case study of the usage of the social networking platform studiVZ by students in Salzburg, Austria. The topic is framed by the context of electronic surveillance. An online survey that was based on questionnaire that consisted of 35 (single and multiple) choice questions, 3 open-ended questions, and 5 interval-scaled questions, was carried out (N = 674). The knowledge that students have in general was assessed with by calculating a surveillance knowledge (...) index, the critical awareness towards surveillance by calculating a surveillance critique index. Knowledge about studiVZ as well as information behaviour on the platform were analyzed and related to the surveillance parameters. The results show that public information and discussion about surveillance and social networking platforms is important for activating critical information behaviour. In the case of studiVZ, a change of the terms of use in 2008 that brought about the possibility of targeted personalized advertising, was the subject of public discussions that influenced students’ knowledge and information behaviour. (shrink)

Avec l’entrée en vigueur de l’Énoncé de politique des trois conseils, la surveillance éthique continue fait maintenant partie intégrante du processus d’évaluation éthique sur la scène universitaire canadienne. Pourtant, malgré l’acceptation de ce concept, les chercheurs et les institutions se questionnent sur sa portée et sa mise en application. Dans cette perspective, cet article porte un regard sur les racines et les variantes du concept, les efforts de rationalisation dont il a fait l’objet en contexte américain d’où il a (...) émergé et sur le contexte de son entrée sur la scène canadienne. (shrink)

PurposeThis paper aims to present results of a study that focused on the question of how computer and data experts think about Internet and social media surveillance after Edward Snowden’s revelations about the existence of mass-surveillance systems of the Internet such as Prism, XKeyscore and Tempora. Computer and data experts’ views are of particular relevance because they are confronted day by day with questions about the processing of personal data, privacy and data protection.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted two focus (...) groups with a total of ten experts based in London. As London is considered by some as the surveillance capital of the world, and has a thriving Internet industry, it provided a well-suited context.FindingsThe focus group discussions featured three topics that are of crucial importance for understanding Internet and social media surveillance: the political economy surveillance in general; surveillance in the context of the Snowden revelations; and the question what the best political reactions are to the existence of a surveillance-industrial complex that results in political and economic control of the Internet and social media. The focus groups provided indications that computer and data experts are pre-eminently informed on how Internet surveillance works, are capable of critically assessing its implications for society and have ideas about on what should be done politically.Originality/valueStudies of privacy and surveillance after Edward Snowden’s revelations have taken on a new dimension: Large-scale covert surveillance is conducted in a collaborative endeavour of secret services, private communications corporations and security companies. It has become evident that a surveillance-industrial Internet surveillance complex exists, in which capitalist communications and security corporations and state institutions collaborate. (shrink)

Investigating the theoretical and empirical relationships between transparency and trust in the context of surveillance, this volume argues that neither transparency nor trust provides a simple and self-evident path for mitigating the negative political and social consequences of state surveillance practices. Dominant in both the scholarly literature and public debate is the conviction that transparency can promote better-informed decisions, greater oversight, and restore trust damaged by the secrecy of surveillance. The contributions to this volume challenge this (...) conventional wisdom by considering how relations of trust and policies of transparency are modulated by underlying power asymmetries, socio-historical legacies, economic structures, and institutional constraints. They study trust and transparency as embedded in specific socio-political contexts to show how, under certain conditions, transparency can become a tool of social control that erodes trust, while mistrust-rather than trust-can sometimes offer the most promising approach to safeguarding rights and freedom in an age of surveillance. The first book addressing the inter-relationship of trust, transparency, and surveillance practices, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of surveillance studies as well as appeal to an interdisciplinary audience given the contributions come from political science, sociology, philosophy, law, and civil society. (shrink)

Governments regularly rely on citizens’ cooperation in exercising their authority, including the enforcement of rules. This is not only common, but also a necessary practice in a legal system. Technology makes such reliance easier, facilitating increased enforcement of law at little cost. Emergency provides an added legitimizing logic, encouraging citizens’ cooperation and leading them to uncritically follow the government’s lead to reduce the risk to the nation and to themselves. This article considers governments’ crowdsourcing citizens to monitor and surveil other (...) citizens. One central concern this practice raises is that it allows governments to circumvent the limits of their legitimate authority and to augment their power while also obscuring the actor responsible for the surveillance and enforcement action. Consequently, accountability and public oversight over the government are diminished. Where does conventional enlisting of cooperation from law-abiding citizens end, and crowdsourcing totalitarian mass mobilization of citizens against fellow citizens begin? The article’s principal claim is that a bright line should be drawn where governments’ crowdsourcing of information from citizens serves as a means to circumvent democratic checks on their power to collect information, while also disguising the actor responsible for the surveillance. Such practice severely erodes social trust between citizens, jeopardizing their ability to organize and collaborate as engaged citizens and thus serve as a check on government. It further grants excessive power to some citizens over others, endangering the latter’s freedom, especially where the information gathered is used to symbolically or actually exclude certain individuals from the political community. (shrink)

In her BBC Reith Lectures on Trust, Onora O’Neill offers a short, but biting, criticism of transparency. People think that trust and transparency go together but in reality, says O'Neill, they are deeply opposed. Transparency forces people to conceal their actual reasons for action and invent different ones for public consumption. Transparency forces deception. I work out the details of her argument and worsen her conclusion. I focus on public transparency – that is, transparency to the public over expert domains. (...) I offer two versions of the criticism. First, the epistemic intrusion argument: The drive to transparency forces experts to explain their reasoning to non-experts. But expert reasons are, by their nature, often inaccessible to non-experts. So the demand for transparency can pressure experts to act only in those ways for which they can offer public justification. Second, the intimate reasons argument: In many cases of practical deliberation, the relevant reasons are intimate to a community and not easily explicable to those who lack a particular shared background. The demand for transparency, then, pressures community members to abandon the special understanding and sensitivity that arises from their particular experiences. Transparency, it turns out, is a form of surveillance. By forcing reasoning into the explicit and public sphere, transparency roots out corruption — but it also inhibits the full application of expert skill, sensitivity, and subtle shared understandings. The difficulty here arises from the basic fact that human knowledge vastly outstrips any individual’s capacities. We all depend on experts, which makes us vulnerable to their biases and corruption. But if we try to wholly secure our trust — if we leash groups of experts to pursuing only the goals and taking only the actions that can be justified to the non-expert public — then we will undermine their expertise. We need both trust and transparency, but they are in essential tension. This is a deep practical dilemma; it admits of no neat resolution, but only painful compromise. (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how surveillance facilitates new power relationships.Design/methodology/approachThis longitudinal qualitative study is predicated on observations of the home care workers interacting with their managers and clients. The emerging picture was complemented with interviews of the participants. The home care workers were chosen as being crucial in the construction of new everyday relationships, and their interpretations were given most value in presenting how surveillance and monitoring relationships are constructed as embedded mundane practices and (...) as emerging from practical needs.FindingsThe paper discusses an implementation and use case of surveillance capable technology in a social home care setting. The findings suggest discrepancy of how surveillance is being interpreted by different participants depending on their positioning in the context of use.Originality/valueThe study presents a case study where surveillance issues emerge not only at the workplace but also in the domestic sphere. The paper explores the workers' role in defining surveillance at the workplace, and questions the limits of legitimate surveillance in the social care context concerning vulnerable citizens as clients. (shrink)

This chapter provides a high-level overview of key ethical issues raised by the use of surveillance technologies, such as digital contact tracing, disease surveillance, and vaccine passports, to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. To some extent, these issues are entirely familiar. I argue that they raise old questions in new form and with new urgency, at the intersection of information ethics, research ethics, and public health. Whenever we deal with data-driven technologies, we have to ask how they fare in (...) relation to important values like privacy, fairness, transparency, and accountability—values emphasized by information ethics scholars. Likewise, when such technologies put individuals at risk in order to drive scientific research and knowledge construction, we have to ask how they implicate values such as autonomy, beneficence and non-maleficence, and justice—values central to research ethics. And as researchers focusing on health information have long argued, when the data collected by these technologies pertain to individuals and public health, these ethical issues take on a special cast. -/- It is also true, however, that the pandemic has placed these questions in a new and revealing light. I highlight three insights from information ethics and research ethics that can help us navigate this difficult terrain. First, the value of privacy is instrumental, not absolute—there is nothing wrong with asking how to balance privacy against other important values. Second, privacy has both individual and social importance. Weighing privacy, on one hand, and public health, on the other, is not, therefore, a contest between individual and collective interests. Rather, it is an attempt to balance disparate public goods. Third, we ought to put these kinds of ethical decisions in the hands of third parties, rather than leaving them up to those who directly stand to benefit from them. In the case of pandemic surveillance technologies, this should mean more public, democratic oversight. (shrink)

Foucault’s disciplinary society and his notion of panopticism are often invoked in discussions regarding electronic surveillance. Against this use of Foucault, I argue that contemporary trends in surveillance technology abstract human bodies from their territorial settings, separating them into a series of discrete flows through what Deleuze will term, the surveillant assemblage. The surveillant assemblage and its product, the socially sorted body, aim less at molding, punishing and controlling the body and more at triggering events of in- and (...) ex-clusion from life opportunities. The meaning of the body as monitored by latest generation vision technologies formed from machine only surveillance has been transformed. Such a body is no longer disciplinary in the Foucauldian sense. It is a virtual/flesh interface broken into discrete data flows whose comparison and breakage generate bodies as both legible and eligible (or illegible). (shrink)

Video surveillance plays a vital role in maintaining the social security although, until now, large uncertainty still exists in danger understanding and recognition, which can be partly attributed to intractable environment changes in the backgrounds. This article presents a brain-inspired computing of attention value of surrounding environment changes with a processes-based cognition model by introducing a ratio valueλof EC-implications within considered periods. Theoretical models for computation of warning level of EC-implications to the universal video recognition efficiency are further (...) established. Imbedding proposed models into the online algorithms is suggested as a future research priority towards precision security for critical applications and, furthermore, schemes for a practical implementation of such integration are also preliminarily discussed. (shrink)

In Europe, telecare is the use of remote monitoring technology to enable vulnerable people to live independently in their own homes. The technology includes electronic tags and sensors that transmit information about the user's location and patterns of behavior in the user's home to an external hub, where it can trigger an intervention in an emergency. Telecare users in the United Kingdom sometimes report their unease about being monitored by a ?Big Brother,? and the same kind of electronic tags that (...) alert telecare hubs to the movements of someone with dementia who is ?wandering? are worn by terrorist suspects who have been placed under house arrest. For these and other reasons, such as ordinary privacy concerns, telecare is sometimes regarded as an objectionable extension of a ?surveillance state.? In this article, we defend the use of telecare against the charge that it is Orwellian. In the United States, the conception of telecare primarily as telemedicine, and the fact that it is not typically a government responsibility, make a supposed connection with a surveillance state even more doubtful than in Europe. The main objection, we argue, to telecare is not its intrusiveness, but the danger of its deepening the isolation of those who use it. There are ways of organizing telecare so that the independence and privacy of users are enhanced, but personal isolation may be harder to address. As telecare is a means of reducing the cost of publicly provided social and health care, and the need to reduce public spending is growing, the correlative problem of isolation must be addressed alongside the goal of promoting independence. (shrink)

‘Social media’ like Facebook or Twitter have become tremendously popular in recent years. Their popularity provides new opportunities for data collection by state and private companies, which requires a critical and theoretical focus on social media surveillance. The task of this paper is to outline a theoretical framework for defining social media surveillance in the context of contemporary society, identifying its principal characteristics, and understanding its broader societal implications. Social media surveillance is a (...) form of surveillance in which different forms of sociality and individuals different social roles converge, so that surveillance becomes a monitoring of different activities in different social roles with the help of profiles that hold a complex networked multitude of data about humans. (shrink)

The concept of surveillance has recently been complemented by the concept of sousveillance. Neither term, however, has been rigorously defined, and it is particularly unclear how to understand and delimit sousveillance. This article sketches a generic definition of surveillance and proceeds to explore various ways in which we might define sousveillance, including power differentials, surreptitiousness, control, reciprocity, and moral valence. It argues that for each of these ways of defining it, sousveillance either fails to be distinct from (...) class='Hi'>surveillance or to provide a generally useful concept. As such, the article concludes that academics should avoid the neologism, and simply clarify what sense of surveillance is at stake when necessary. (shrink)

This article offers a theological ethics of surveillance in its form as social sorting. The skill of visibility is deployed as an analytical device to critique the saliency of privacy rights-talk, given the focus of surveillance having shifted from a panoptic gaze to actionable intelligence. The claim is made that an ideology of normativity and the political categories of ‘evil’ and ‘risky’ persons can be addressed by the notions of relational knowledge, the resurrection of the non-person and (...) the power of the future. Three biblical vignettes illustrate visibility and offer imaginative responses. (shrink)

Surveillance is sometimes spoken of as a God’s eye view of the world. This idea is explored in relation to the ‘objective gaze’ of disengaged reason in the Enlightenment and its technologically-reinforced modes in the twenty-first century. The rise of the eye-centred viewpoint is coincident with the ‘great disembedding’ of individuals from the social. This in turn also prompted the self-disciplines of modernity, which are now key aspects of the power-base of modern institutions. A crucial moment in this (...) shift was Bentham’s panopticon proposal, in which the knowledge regime of secular ism started to shape social imaginaries in relation to surveillance. While secular omniscience was sought through the surveillance gaze, and explored later in the work of Foucault, Debord and others, the eye-centred view is not without critics. We draw upon some biblical resources, notably, the story of Hagar, that query the centrality of ‘objective vision’. Instead, an ethic of care is proposed, based in part on a fresh understanding of the ‘eye of God’. It is argued that the implications of the care ethic go far deeper than current appeals to privacy, data protection, civil liberties or human rights. (shrink)

Purpose This study aims to analyse the impacts of Edward Snowden’s revelations in Spain focusing on issues of privacy and state surveillance. This research takes into consideration the Spanish context from a multidimensional perspective: social, cultural, legal and political. Design/methodology/approach The paper reviews the Spanish privacy and state surveillance situation. Responses to a questionnaire were collected from 207 university students studying at Universitat Rovira i Virgili or Burgos University. The quantitative responses to the survey were statistically analysed (...) as well as qualitative considerations of free-text answers. Findings The survey outcomes demonstrate that a majority of respondents are aware of Snowden’s revelations, but only a few have even considered taking serious actions to improve their online privacy. One of the most relevant findings is that Spanish citizens find it acceptable to lose privacy and be subject to state surveillance if that provides a benefit in security. Practical implications The research points out the importance of privacy in a multicultural environment. A sensitised society is a keystone for the healthy and balanced development of state surveillance policy and practice. Social implications Training programmes are a critical dimension to ensure awareness across society regarding privacy and digital technologies. Suitable educational policies and curricula at all levels should be fostered. Originality/value Privacy and state surveillance based on information and communication technologies is an emerging research topic with important consequences for social values and ethics. This study provides an overview of Spanish higher education students’ attitudes in these areas. (shrink)

Introduction - This paper is aimed at gaining more insight into the effects of camera-surveillance on behavior. This study investigates the effects of three different ways of ‘framing’ camera presence on cheating behavior and pro-social behavior. First, we explore the effect of presenting the camera as the medium through which an intimidating authority watches the participant. Second, we test the effect of presenting the camera as being a neutral, non-intimidating viewer. Third, we investigate whether a participant watching themselves (...) via a camera has an effect on their behavior. In contrast to most studies of camera surveillance, we will conduct our experiments in an indoor setting, enabling us to investigate behavior to a much greater detail. We will also explore possible moderating effects of personality traits. Methods - 86 students participated in this experiment, distributed over four conditions: three different ways of framing the camera presence, plus a control condition. Our main dependent variables were various kinds of cheating and pro-social behavior. We established the participant’s relevant personality traits in a separate session. Results - For cheating behavior, findings showed that the ‘authorative’ way of framing camera presence and the situation in which participants viewed themselves, differed significantly from a situation without camera-surveillance. We did not find significant effects of camera surveillance on pro-social behavior during the experiment. Looking at personality traits, we found an indication that people with an internal locus of control are more inclined to cheat when there is no camera present compared to people with an external locus of control. However, the effects of our manipulations were stronger. Conclusion - These results support the idea that the framing of a camera’s presence does indeed influence cheating behavior, adding to the preventive effects of camera-surveillance. Additionally, this study provides some valuable insights into the influence of camera presence on behavior in general. (shrink)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging global infrastructure that employs wireless sensors to collect, store, and exchange data. Increasingly, applications for marketing and advertising have been articulated as a means to enhance the consumer shopping experience, in addition to improving efficiency. However, privacy advocates have challenged the mass aggregation of personally-identifiable information in databases and geotracking, the use of location-based services to identify one’s precise location over time. This paper employs the framework of contextual integrity related to privacy (...) developed by Nissenbaum (Privacy in context: technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2010) as a tool to understand citizen response to implementation IoT-related technology in the supermarket. The purpose of the study was to identify and understand specific changes in information practices brought about by the IoT that may be perceived as privacy violations. Citizens were interviewed, read a scenario of near-term IoT implementation, and were asked to reflect on changes in the key actors involved, information attributes, and principles of transmission. Areas where new practices may occur with the IoT were then highlighted as potential problems (privacy violations). Issues identified included the mining of medical data, invasive targeted advertising, and loss of autonomy through marketing profiles or personal affect monitoring. While there were numerous aspects deemed desirable by the participants, some developments appeared to tip the balance between consumer benefit and corporate gain. This surveillance power creates an imbalance between the consumer and the corporation that may also impact individual autonomy. The ethical dimensions of this problem are discussed. (shrink)

Public consumption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has been rarely investigated from the perspective of data surveillance and security. We show that the technology acceptance model, when properly modified with security and surveillance fears about AI, builds an insight on how individuals begin to use, accept, or evaluate AI and its automated decisions. We conducted two studies, and found positive roles of perceived ease of use (PEOU) and perceived usefulness (PU). AI security concern, however, negatively affected PEOU and (...) PU, resulting in less acceptance of AI—(1) use, (2) preference, and (3) participation. AI surveillance concern also had negative effects on the credibility of AI and its recommendations. We integrated extant literature on socio-demographic differences, providing an insight on how AI acceptance is based on one’s rationality regarding (1) technological risks (security/surveillance) and (2) benefits (PEOU/PU) as well as other contextual factors of socio-demographics. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to the issue of surveillance in capitalism (surveillance capitalism), a phenomenon which has spread in that socio-economic system since the beginning of the 21st century. We attempt to point out the harmfulness of information technologies developing in the wrong direction, carrying the ideas of dataism and post-truth, which increasingly colonize human living space. It turns out that the information (traces) that people leave while operating on the Internet is a source of predicting human behavior (...) in the future (behavioral futures markets). Thus, for the most developed Internet enterprises in the world, they become a motive for violating what seem to be basic political rights, mainly freedom, property and security. As a result, under the influence of the disinformation often present on the Internet, people’s behavior may take the most socially undesirable forms, but desirable in the virtual world. The considerations in the paper are primarily theoretical. The descriptive method was used with elements of the conceptual analysis of surveillance capitalism in the context of dataism and post-truth. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide an overview of surveillance theories and concepts that can help to understand and debate surveillance in its many forms. As scholars from an increasingly wide range of disciplines are discussing surveillance, this literature review can offer much-needed common ground for the debate. We structure surveillance theory in three roughly chronological/thematic phases. The first two conceptualise surveillance through comprehensive theoretical frameworks which are elaborated in the third phase. The first phase, featuring (...) Bentham and Foucault, offers architectural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is often physical and spatial, involving centralised mechanisms of watching over subjects. Panoptic structures function as architectures of power, not only directly but also through disciplining of the watched subjects. The second phase offers infrastructural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is networked and relies primarily on digital rather than physical technologies. It involves distributed forms of watching over people, with increasing distance to the watched and often dealing with data doubles rather than physical persons. Deleuze, Haggerty and Ericson, and Zuboff develop different theoretical frameworks than panopticism to conceptualise the power play involved in networked surveillance. The third phase of scholarship refines, combines or extends the main conceptual frameworks developed earlier. Surveillance theory branches out to conceptualise surveillance through concepts such as dataveillance, access control, social sorting, peer-to-peer surveillance and resistance. With the datafication of society, surveillance combines the physical with the digital, government with corporate surveillance and top-down with self-surveillance. (shrink)

While maintaining the importance of privacy for critical evaluations of surveillance technologies, I suggest that privacy also constrains the debate by framing analyses in terms of the individual. Public space provides a site for considering what is at stake with surveillance technologies besides privacy. After describing two accounts of privacy and one of public space, I argue that surveillance technologies simultaneously add an ambiguityand a specificity to public places that are detrimental to the social, cultural, and (...) civic importance of these places. By making public places accessible to other places and/or times, surveillance technologies make these social contexts ambiguous by blurring their spatial and temporal bounds. At the same time, surveillancetechnologies valence public places in functionally specificways that are detrimental to informal civic life. To complement defensive approaches to surveillance technologies based onindividual privacy, I conclude by suggesting how sociality as a relational value or an ethics of place as a contextual value could provide a proactive line of reasoning for affirming the value ofthat which is between people and places. (shrink)

This paper reviews the social scientific literature on biometric surveillance, with particular attention to its potential harms. It maps the harms caused by biometric surveillance, traces their theoretical origins, and brings these harms together in one integrative framework to elucidate their cumulative power. Demonstrating these harms with examples from the United States, the European Union, and Israel, I propose that biometric surveillance be addressed, evaluated and reframed as a new form of control rather than simply another (...) means of inspection. I conclude by delineating three features of biometric technologies—complexity, objectivity, and agency—that demonstrate their social power and draw attention to the importance of studying biometric surveillance. (shrink)

Analyses of contemporary surveillance are considered in relation to the growing liquidity of contemporary social relations. When state surveillance is revealed by Edward Snowden to depend on consumer data, this illustrates Bauman’s observations about today’s rapidly mobile and “extraterritorial” power. Such power is increasingly based on highly asymmetrical visibility of watcher and watched but paradoxically also depends on “panoptic selfie-surveillance” which complicates both analysis and ethics in significant ways. Strongly panoptic power, where it still exists, is (...) largely at the margins, in Bauman’s writing, as seen for instance his gesturing towards Loic Wacquant’s. Here, as in Didier Bigo’s “banopticon” the power is exclusionary rather than inclusionary — which was the form of the original panopticon design. But the soft forms of “selfie surveillance” also have panoptic dimensions that demand consideration. The ethical questions now foregrounded go far beyond questions of “privacy”, narrowly conceived, to issues of social inclusion and democratic participation. (shrink)

New ubiquitous information and communication technologies, in particular recording-enabled smart devices and social media programs, are giving rise to a profound new power for ordinary people to monitor and track each other on a global scale. Along with this growing capacity to monitor one another is a new capacity to explicitly and publicly judge one another—to rate, rank, comment on, shame and humiliate each other through the net. Drawing upon warnings from Kierkegaard and Mill on the power of public (...) opinion to produce conformity, I argue a new apparatus of surveillance and control is being generated that threatens individual freedom through a coercion of the will by an anonymous and interconnected crowd. I conclude that we must urgently assess how to protect individuals from a social tyranny of the public enabled by these new technologies while effective measures can still be taken to mitigate their dangers. (shrink)

At the most mundane level, CCTV observes bodies, and as such attaches great importance to the specific features of the human body. At the same time, however, bodies tend to disappear, as they are represented electronically by the camera monitors and, in the case of image recording, by the computer systems processing data. The roles of bodies(either as targets of surveillance or as translations into flows of disembodied information), however, are not unimportant or inconsequential, but may in fact give (...) rise to a number of tangible ethical dilemmas. Firstly, the virtual representation of the embodied actor is not a neutral, unproblematic process. Body representation techniques such as CCTV produce constructions of the subject that involve judgmental, discriminatory processes of categorisation and are based on asymmetrical relations between observers and observed. Secondly, the `data doubles' are not inconsequential: the representations of the body produced by CCTV can have palpable consequences for the embodied self and its life chances. The widespread use of CCTV could therefore give rise to individual as well as social issues, and possibly in a different manner than previous surveillance technologies. This fact signals the need for(re-)conceptualisations of moral values (such as privacy) applicable to the case of CCTV which take into account the importance of bodily protections. (shrink)

Frequent observation: sexualities, self‐surveillance, confession and the construction of the active patient Following Foucault’s analyses of the development of the disciplinary power of the medical gaze, this paper describes the themes that are relocating the ‘active patient’ as the central object of health scrutiny by professionals. A key element in these discourses has been the deployment of power through disciplinary knowledge and techniques of social control through ritual forms of confession, thereby positing the patient/client as the subject of (...) self‐surveillance. The individual is also engaged their own sexuality, performativity and ‘truths’ of sexual experience. These Foucauldian insights have constructed the notion of surveillance medicine, whereby with the assistance of professional technologies, not only the patient’s body but also the ‘self’ can be probed through incitement to confess. However, the actor is not docile; resistances to disciplinary techniques are evident and within the professional practices of the clinic, there is resistance to the power of the erotic. The paper draws on recent research on the social construction of male sexualities in the fields of genitourinary practice, and explores how the ceremonial practices of the clinic engage with the rise of surveillance medicine and the medicalisation of everyday life. The individual actor is exhorted to engage in increased sexual and medical self‐surveillance and to be recruited in the project of becoming an ‘active patient’. It concludes with an examination of some of the implications this surveillance of self may have for practitioners in terms of power and the professional lens through which the sexualised, symbolic body is viewed. (shrink)

The association of colour, sensation and the body, which is noted by Jacqueline Lichtenstein and Merleau-Ponty through their insights on colour as the disturbing of structure and form, offers a way in which to foreground a series of questions about embodiment and the discourse of vision. An analysis of the chromatics of Red Road, which features a female protagonist who works as a surveillance officer in a CCTV control room, offers a way to echo and disrupt the ‘mechanisms and (...) techniques of reality-control’ and to challenge what constitutes socially acceptable bodies and the cinematic institution of the image of woman. In Red Road the legible architecture of the film image emerges through the myriad colours of light reflected by a camera lens and the effacement of details in areas affected by shadow and variations in focus. The camera is almost always in motion and responsive to the gestures of the protagonist's body, signalling the potential of the chromatics of Red Road to trouble the structures of seeing familiar to cinematic representation. Colour and perception remain open to contingency and change, fostering alternative subject positions that trace the interrelations of the body — its senses and sensations — and the discourse of vision. The unsettling of perception refigures the encounter between the self and others through the imaginary or fictional worlds that remind us of the uncertainties and vulnerability of such interactions. (shrink)

This article details the rapid extension of the video surveillance of downtown `public' spaces. Its main argument is that this surveillance is racially differentiated, and that it zones the city differently for Blacks and whites, eroding the Black freedoms of movement and association, while leaving those of whites intact. It also considers isses of privacy as a political zone of potential social change, and raises concern about its video-electronic erosion. The argument is set within the overall argument (...) that underneath the structures of democracy totalitarian tendencies are rapidly extending their reach. (shrink)

Purpose The proliferation of surveillance-enhancing laws, policies and technologies across African countries deepens the risk of privacy rights breaches, as well as the risks of adverse profiling and social sorting. There is a heightened need for dedicated advocacy and activism to consistently demand accountability and transparency from African states, governments and their allies regarding surveillance. The purpose of this paper is to understand the issue frames that accompany anti-surveillance and privacy advocacy in Ghana and the related (...) implications. Design/methodology/approach Using a qualitative and interpretivist approach, the author focuses on three different surveillance-oriented incidents/programs in Ghana and analyzes the frames underpinning the related advocacy and narratives of various non-state actors. Findings Privacy and anti-surveillance advocacy in Ghana tends to be less framed in the context of privacy rights and is more driven by concerns about corruption and value for money. Such pecuniary emphasis is rational per issue salience calculations as it elevates principles of economic probity, transparency and accountability and pursues a high public shock value and resonance. Practical implications Economics-centered critiques of surveillance could be counterproductive as they create a low bar for surveillance promoters and sustains a culture of permissible statist intrusions into citizens’ lives once economic virtues are satisfied. Originality/value While anti-surveillance and privacy advocacy is budding across African countries, little is known about its nature, frames and modus compared to such advocacy in European and North American settings. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is likely the first paper or one of the first dedicated fully to anti-surveillance and advocacy in Africa. (shrink)

This paper addresses issues regarding perceptions of surveillance technologies in Europe. It analyses existing studies in order to explore how perceptions of surveillance affect and are affected by the negative effects of surveillance and how perceptions and effectiveness of surveillance technologies relate to each other. The paper identifies 12 negative effects of surveillance including, among others, privacy intrusion, the chilling effect and social exclusion, and classifies them into three groups. It further illustrates the different (...) ways in which perceptions and effectiveness of surveillance interact with each other, distinguishing between perceived security and perceived effectiveness. Finally, the paper advances a methodology to take into account perception issues when designing new surveillance technologies. By doing so, it rejects manipulative measures aiming at improving perceptions only and suggests measures that address the background conditions affecting perceptions. (shrink)

This article provides a history of private sector tracking technologies, examining how the advent of commercial surveillance centered around a logic of data capitalism. Data capitalism is a system in which the commoditization of our data enables an asymmetric redistribution of power that is weighted toward the actors who have access and the capability to make sense of information. It is enacted through capitalism and justified by the association of networked technologies with the political and social benefits of (...) online community, drawing upon narratives that foreground the social and political benefits of networked technologies. I examine its origins in the wake of the dotcom bubble, when technology makers sought to develop a new business model to support online commerce. By leveraging user data for advertising purposes, they contributed to an information environment in which every action leaves behind traces collected by companies for commercial purposes. Through analysis of primary source materials produced by technology makers, journalists, and business analysts, I examine the emergence of data capitalism between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s and its central role in the contemporary information economy. (shrink)

How much surveillance is morally permissible in the pursuit of a socially desirable goal? The proportionality question has received renewed attention during the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, because governments in many countries have responded to the pandemic by implementing, redirecting or expanding state surveillance, most controversially in the shape of collection and use of cell-phone location data to support a strategy of contact tracing, testing and containment. Behind the proportionality question lies a further question: in what way does a (...) state of emergency affect the proportionality of morally permissible surveillance? On the qualitative difference view, a state of emergency has the effect of suspending or altering at least some of the constraints on morally permissible action that apply under ordinary circumstances. On the quantitative difference view, the only difference between states of emergency and ordinary circumstances is that the stakes are greater in a state of emergency. If the qualitative difference view is true, then there are situations, perhaps such as the current Coronavirus pandemic, during which the proportionality condition employs a much less demanding ratio between social goods achieved and the badness of the surveillance performed. The overall objective of this article is to argue against the qualitative and for the quantitative difference view. I proceed by first setting out in somewhat greater detail how we must understand the qualitative difference view (section two). I then present a series of problematic implications of adopting the qualitative difference view and argue that jointly these give us sufficient reason to reject it (section three). This entails that our account of morally permissible surveillance should be unexceptional, i.e. the quantitative difference view: there is no morally significant difference between proportionality in ordinary circumstances and proportionality in emergencies, simply a spectrum of smaller to greater potential goods and bads of surveillance. In order to flesh out the implications of the quantitative view, I briefly sketch an unexceptional theory of proportional surveillance in exceptional circumstances (section four). The last section (five) summarises and concludes. (shrink)

Surveillance is a core function of all public health systems. Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have deployed traditional public health surveillance responses, such as contact tracing and quarantine, and extended these responses with the use of varied technologies, such as the use of smartphone location data, data networks, ankle bracelets, drones, and big data analysis. Applying Foucault’s (1979) notion of the panopticon, with its twin focus on surveillance and self-regulation, as the preeminent form of social control (...) in modern societies, we examine the increasing levels of surveillance enacted during this pandemic and how people have participated in, and extended, this surveillance, self-regulation, and social control through the use of digital media. Consideration is given to how such surveillance may serve public health needs and/or political interests and whether the rapid deployment of these extensive surveillance mechanisms risks normalizing these measures so that they become more acceptable and then entrenched post-COVID-19. (shrink)

In philosophical terms, the African encounter with Western modernity defines the context within which much of what unfolds in postcolonial Africa can be understood, including even its ethical and social problems. This work utilizes Foucault’s theory of panopticism to reflect on the challenges of social control and harmony in contemporary African society. It establishes the link between panopticism and indigenous African cultures from the fact that indigenous societies deployed mechanisms of instituting social control and harmony similar to (...) the phenomena of panoticism and the technologies of control that it symbolizes today. African metaphysical thought, its beliefs, and mythological paraphernalia played the important role of providing an overarching framework within which questions of social control, relations, ethics and even harmony with nature were defined and understood in the past. Modern institutions and technologies of surveillance, whilst crucial to social control, may need to be supported by re-strengthening indigenous interpretive and normative cultural frameworks that promoted elements of self-surveillance and responsible being in traditional communities. (shrink)

Social sorting of migrants and travellers based on data stored in information systems is at the centre of border controls and mobility management in Europe. Recent literature finds that the inclusion-exclusion distinction is insufficiently equipped to do justice to the variety of classifications that is being applied. Instead, a proliferation of refined categorizations determines the outcome of visa and permit applications. This article explores the ‘administrative ecology’ in between the two extremes of inclusion and exclusion. It claims information technologies (...) encourage the emergence of an intermediary category of ‘non-publics’ situated between the level of groups and the level of individuals. The ontological and normative status of these ‘non-publics’ will be analysed by using some key notions of Actor-Network Theory. (shrink)

While the academic separation of policing and regulation is still largely operative, points of convergence are more significant than ever in the digital age, starting with concomitant debates about algorithms as a new figure of power. From the policing of illegal activities to the regulation of legal ones, the algorithmization of such critical social ordering practices has been the subject of growing attention. These burgeoning discussions are focused on one common element: big data surveillance. In accordance with such (...) similarities and paralleled developments in policing and regulation, the article aims to further bridge the gap between literatures to respond to the calls for studying big data surveillance across institutional domains and social fields. To do so, it is focused on one case study that articulates algorithmic policing and regulation domains, in-between security and economic fields. This is the fight against illicit finance, i.e. ‘the global action against the financial flows that fuel crime and terrorism’. To what extent does big data surveillance make a difference in the main global policy of crime-fighting and financial regulation? Drawing on a fieldwork in a large North American bank, the present article takes stock of the algorithmic overlap between policing and regulation. It argues that the final result is policing and regulation of neither too much nor too little, which gives rise to automated and everyday mass surveillance while remaining as far removed from regulatory and crime-fighting ambitions as it is from dystopian visions of big data and algorithmic drama. (shrink)

Surveillance capitalism companies, such as Google and Facebook, have substantially increased the amount of information collected, analyzed, and monetized, including health information increasingly used in precision medicine research, thereby presenting great challenges for health privacy.

Surveillance serves as the eyes of public health. It has provided the foundation for planning, intervention, and disease prevention and has been critical for epidemiology research into patterns of morbidity and mortality for a wide variety of disease and conditions. Registries have been essential for tracking individuals and their conditions over time. Surveillance has also served to trigger the imposition of public health control measures, such as contact tracing, mandatory treatment, and quarantine. The threat of such intervention and (...) long-term monitoring has provoked alarm and rendered surveillance suspect for those concerned about the unwarranted exercise of state authority in the name of public health. Thus the history of surveillance has been bounded by promise of disease control and a specter of intrusion. In this article we address the tension between the public's need for knowledge as a foundation for rational policy-making and the centrality of norms of privacy for democratic societies. (shrink)

Today’s bodies are akin to ‘walking sensor platforms’. Bodies either host, or are the subjects of, an array of sensing devices that act to convert bodily movements, actions and dynamics into circulative data. This article proposes the notions of ‘disembodied exhaust’ and ‘embodied exhaustion’ to conceptualise processes of bodily sensorisation and datafication. As the material body interfaces with networked sensor technologies and sensing infrastructures, it emits disembodied exhaust: gaseous flows of personal information that establish a representational data-proxy. It is this (...) networked actant that progressively structures how embodied subjects experience their daily lives. The significance of this symbiont medium in determining the outcome of interplays between networked individuals and audiences necessitates that it is carefully contrived. The article explores the nature and function of the data-proxy, and its impact on social relations. Drawing on examples that depict individuals engaging with their data-proxies, the article suggests that managing a virtual presence is analogous to a work relation, demanding diligence and investment. But it also shows how the data-proxy operates as a mode of affect that challenges conventional distinctions made between organic and inorganic bodies, agency and actancy, mortality and immortality, presence and absence. (shrink)

This article examines how facial recognition technology reshapes the philosophical debate over the ethics of video surveillance. When video surveillance is augmented with facial recognition, the data collected is no longer anonymous, and the data can be aggregated to produce detailed psychological profiles. I argue that – as this non-anonymous data of people’s mundane activities is collected – unjust risks of harm are imposed upon individuals. In addition, this technology can be used to catalogue all who publicly participate (...) in political, religious, and socially stigmatised activities, and I argue that this would undermine central interests of liberal democracies. I examine the degree to which the interests of individuals and the societal interests of liberal democracies to maintain people’s obscurity while in public coincide with privacy interests, as popularly understood, and conclude that there is a practical need to articulate a novel right to obscurity to protect the interests of liberal democratic societies. (shrink)

Surveillance serves as the eyes of public health. It has provided the foundation for planning, intervention, and disease prevention and has been critical for epidemiology research into patterns of morbidity and mortality for a wide variety of disease and conditions. Registries have been essential for tracking individuals and their conditions over time. Surveillance has also served to trigger the imposition of public health control measures, such as contact tracing, mandatory treatment, and quarantine. The threat of such intervention and (...) long-term monitoring has provoked alarm and rendered surveillance suspect for those concerned about the unwarranted exercise of state authority in the name of public health. Thus the history of surveillance has been bounded by promise of disease control and a specter of intrusion. In this article we address the tension between the public's need for knowledge as a foundation for rational policy-making and the centrality of norms of privacy for democratic societies. (shrink)

Responses to outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics involves a heterogeneous set of activities that aim to address threats to public health. In addition to research, non-research activities, such as prevention and control interventions, and surveillance, are conducted. The boundaries between research and non-research responses can rapidly blur during a public health emergency such as the COVID-19 pandemic. There may be common elements between these types of activities, and they may draw on the same resources and infrastructure. Non-research activities, such as (...) surveillance and emergency non-research use of unproven interventions, and research activities must all be undertaken in an ethical manner as components of emergency response. However, care is needed to distinguish between non-research public health activities and research, because research often has considerations and requirements for its ethical conduct which are distinct from non-research public health activities. Research aims to produce generalizable knowledge, and mechanisms such as participant consent and independent ethics review aim to ensure that the rights and interests of research participants are respected. Ensuring that research and non-research activities are appropriately distinguished can additionally promote proper coordination of such activities, and increase trust and social accountability in pandemic responses. Consequently, it is important to distinguish between these different activities on the basis of their primary aim, and to consider whether their implementation is justifiable, based on their aims and the relevant ethical framework for each type of activity, and how they are coordinated as part of the larger collective activity of emergency response and management. Complex questions arise about how the different stakeholders involved in decision-making should make valid and justifiable decisions about whether the response activity is research or non-research. The cases in this chapter invite consideration about how such decisions should be made, and their implications, in the context of applications to conduct retrospective research into the outcomes of emergency uses of unproven interventions outside clinical trials, and of characterising antibody-testing initiatives and systematic data collection activities as surveillance or research. (shrink)

Voter surveillance for digital campaigning is perceived as enacted from above. Political parties are “all-seeing actors” combining access to the Voters’ Registry with digital tools to maximize voter turnout. At the same time, new forms of lateral surveillance emerge as citizens voluntarily participate in the data collection process to help political parties achieve their electoral goals. This article examines the reconfiguration of the concepts of crowdsourcing and political participation through the use of voter-surveillance applications. Theoretically, it explores (...) how crowdsourced voter surveillance (CVS) builds on the emancipatory rhetoric of political participation and crowdsourcing while relying on social, technical, and political surveillance infrastructures. Empirically, it maps the information flows and knowledge hierarchies afforded by Elector, a CVS app used by the Likud party in the Israeli election of March 2020. The findings indicate that contrary to the logic of crowdsourcing as democratizing knowledge and participation, CVS cultivates controlled individuals and normalizes lateral surveillance as a ritualistic and desired form of political participation. The article therefore describes the type of political action that CVS constructs as Little Samaritan Brothers: citizens who collectively resign their rights and the rights of their peers for the party’s success. (shrink)

The Snowden leaks, first published in June 2013, provided unprecedented insights into the operations of state-corporate surveillance, highlighting the extent to which everyday communication is integrated into an extensive regime of control that relies on the ‘datafication’ of social life. Whilst such data-driven forms of governance have significant implications for citizenship and society, resistance to surveillance in the wake of the Snowden leaks has predominantly centred on techno-legal responses relating to the development and use of encryption and (...) policy advocacy around privacy and data protection. Based on in-depth interviews with a range of social justice activists, we argue that there is a significant level of ambiguity around this kind of anti-surveillance resistance in relation to broader activist practices, and critical responses to the Snowden leaks have been confined within particular expert communities. Introducing the notion of ‘data justice’, we therefore go on to make the case that resistance to surveillance needs to be conceptualized on terms that can address the implications of this data-driven form of governance in relation to broader social justice agendas. Such an approach is needed, we suggest, in light of a shift to surveillance capitalism in which the collection, use and analysis of our data increasingly comes to shape the opportunities and possibilities available to us and the kind of society we live in. (shrink)

People increasingly live online, sharing publicly what might have once seemed private, but at the same time are enraged by extremes of government surveillance and the corresponding invasion into our private lives. In this enlightening work, Adam Henschke re-examines privacy and property in the age of surveillance in order to understand not only the importance of these social conventions, but also their moral relevance. By analyzing identity and information, and presenting a case for a relation between the (...) two, he explains the moral importance of virtual identities and offers an ethically robust solution to design surveillance technologies. This book should be read by anyone interested in surveillance technology, new information technology more generally, and social concepts like privacy and property. (shrink)