Showing papers in "surveillance and society in 2014"

Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology

Abstract: Metadata and data have become a regular currency for citizens to pay for their communication services and security—a trade-off that has nestled into the comfort zone of most people. This article deconstructs the ideological grounds of datafication. Datafication is rooted in problematic ontological and epistemological claims. As part of a larger social media logic, it shows characteristics of a widespread secular belief. Dataism, as this conviction is called, is so successful because masses of people — naively or unwittingly — trust their personal information to corporate platforms. The notion of trust becomes more problematic because people’s faith is extended to other public institutions (e.g. academic research and law enforcement) that handle their (meta)data. The interlocking of government, business, and academia in the adaptation of this ideology makes us want to look more critically at the entire ecosystem of connective media.

Big Data Surveillance: Introduction

Abstract: If conventional definitions of surveillance emphasize its systematic and targeted character (the notion that there is a specific "object" of surveillance), both aspects undergo some significant modifications when the goal is, generally speaking, to capture as much data as possible about everything, all the time, and hold on to it forever. [...]the ambitious scope of such surveillance raises a host of important issues associated with the infrastructure for collecting and storing huge amounts of data as well as the techniques and technologies for putting it to use. What is significant about the big data moment is not simply that it has become possible to store quantities of data that are impossible for any individual to comprehend (The Library of Alexandria did that, as does the night sky, and the human brain), but the fact that this data can be put to use in novel ways-for assessing disease distributions, tracking business trends, mapping crime patterns, analysing web traffic, and predicting everything from the weather to the behavior of the financial markets, to name but a few examples.

When big data meets dataveillance: the hidden side of analytics

Abstract: Among the numerous implications of digitalization, the debate about ‘big data’ has gained momentum. The central idea capturing attention is that digital data represents the newest key asset organizations should use to gain a competitive edge. Data can be sold, matched with other data, mined, and used to make inferences about anything, from people’s behavior to weather conditions. Particularly, what is known as ‘big data analytics’ — i.e. the modeling and analysis of big data — has become the capability which differentiates, from the rest of the market, the most successful companies. An entire business ecosystem has emerged around the digital data asset, and new types of companies, such as analytical competitors and analytical deputies, are proliferating as a result of the analysis of digital data. However, virtually absent from the big data debate is any mention of one of its constitutive mechanisms — that is, dataveillance. Dataveillance — which refers to the systematic monitoring of people or groups, by means of personal data systems in order to regulate or govern their behavior — sets the stage and reinforces the development of the data economy celebrated in the big data debate. This article aims to make visible the interdependence between dataveillance, big data and analytics by providing real examples of how companies collect, process, analyze and use data to achieve their business objectives.

Why data is not enough: Digital traces as control of self and self-control

Abstract: As an alternative to the seemingly natural objectivity and self-evidence of “data,” this paper builds on recent francophone literature by developing a critical conceptualization of “digital traces” Underlining the materiality and discursiveness of traces allows us to understand and articulate both the technical and sociopolitical implications of digital technology The philosophies of Gilbert Simondon and Michel Foucault give strong ontological and epistemological groundings for interpreting the relationships between technology and processes of subjectification In this light, digital traces are framed as objects and products of heteronomous interventions, the logics of which can be traced through the programs and algorithms deployed Through the empirical examples of “Predictive Policing” and “Quantified Self” digital traces are contrasted with the premises and dreams of Big Data While the later claims to algorithmically correlative, predict and preempt the future by reducing it to a “what-is-to-come,” the digital trace paradigm offers a new perspective on how forms of self-control and control of the self are interdependent facets of “algorithmic governmentality”

From self-tracking to smart urban infrastructures: towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on Big Data

Abstract: Recent debates on surveillance have emphasised the now myriad possibilities of automated, software-based data gathering, management and analysis. One of the many terms used to describe this phenomenon is ‘Big Data’. The field of Big Data covers a large and complex range of practices and technologies from smart borders to CCTV video analysis, and from consumer profiling to self-tracking applications. The paper’s aim is to explore the surveillance dynamics inherent in contemporary Big Data trends. To this end, the paper adopts two main perspectives concerned with two complementary expressions of Big Data: (1) the individual use of various techniques of self-surveillance and tracking and (2) the simultaneous trend to optimise urban infrastructures through smart information technologies. Drawing upon exploratory research conducted by the authors, the paper shows that both expressions of Big Data present a range of common surveillance dynamics on at least four levels: agency, temporality, spatiality and normativity. On these grounds, the paper highlights a series of important issues to explore in future research.

Getting Played: Gamification and the Rise of Algorithmic Surveillance

Abstract: Gamification, the idea that game mechanics can be integrated into assumed "non-game" circumstances has gained ascendance amongst champions of marketing, behavior change and efficiency. Ironically, some of the most heated critique to gamification has been the broader community of "traditional" videogame developers. Connecting broadly to projects surrounding "big data" and algorithmic surveillance, the project of gamification continues to expand and intensify. This paper examines the complex relationship between game designers and the rise of arguments in support of gamification. The essay presents an analysis of the various actors and interests mobilizing arguments, deconstructing their underlying assumptions about the relationship between games and social phenomena. Turning to an analytic framework rooted in Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 1999) and work in Game Studies on the Assemblage of Play (Taylor, 2009) and emergent forms of (played) control (Taylor, 2006) the essay critiques assumptions on either side of the debate on the role of games and play. The strained connections between debates on gamification and broader interest in serious games offers an important moment to explore algorithmic surveillance.

The Gift that Keeps On Giving: Google, Ingress and the Gift of Surveillance

Abstract: This essay analyzes Ingress , Google’s new massively multiplayer online game, as indicative of an emergent gift economy that calls for the datafication of one’s mobile life in exchange for the gift of play. From this perspective, Ingress is only suggestive of broader sociocultural transformations in which citizens must submit to pervasive surveillance in order to participate in contemporary economic and political life. Turning to Roberto Esposito’s recent work on gift-giving and communal exchange, we explain how Google “immunizes” itself from its consumer community by continuously collecting that community’s gift of surveillance while structuring its own conditions of reciprocity.

Watching Us Play: Postures and Platforms of Live Streaming

Abstract: In this article, Austin Walker discusses streaming , the practice of broadcasting the gameplay footage. Providing a brief analysis of the range of streaming practices, Walker argues that streaming represents a sea change in how players share and collaborate, adding new sorts of social interactivity to an experience that was, for so long, solitary. Live streaming’s novelty grants it special status as a practice still in formation, making it especially useful in analyzing how late capitalism identifies and appropriates fresh cultural activity--doing so in this case through the development of an infrastructure that supports and encourages voluntary self-surveillance. While there are resistive elements of live-streaming, such as allowing new voices access to broadcast capabilities, streaming also represents socialized labour. Walker separates streaming into two stances: the active streaming posture, where streamers voluntarily choose to broadcast their play, and the passive streaming posture, where streaming is automatically incorporated into the hardware and/or software of the gaming platform and players are unable to opt in or out.

Gaps in the gaze: Informatic practice and the work of public health surveillance

Abstract: Many works that may be situated within the interdisciplinary field of Surveillance Studies have described dangerous potentialities associated with the pervasive, IT-mediated merger of once discrete data sets In effect, these works cautioned about the rise of “big data” before it was named as such Even so, they share an uncomfortable consonance with euphoric claims about the revolutionary transformation portended by big data Situating both euphoric and critical accounts of the IT-mediated gaze within a larger informatic ethos — a spirit in the Weberian sense of this term, defined above all by its concealment of the labor that makes IT work — this article argues that discourse on the data-driven, information revolution must be supplemented by a more modest discourse empirically rooted in the everyday, pragmatic realities of IT Where it departs from well-established social scientific analyses of IT, however, is in its development of a novel concept: informatic practice Informatic practice may be defined as the sum of labor or activity that materializes information, including, for instance, such mundane activities as data entry To empirically illustrate some complexities associated with informatic practice, this article discusses process challenges associated with the implementation of a large-scale (or “big”), regionally interconnected public health information system in Ontario, Canada Informed by science and technology studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT), it uses documentary evidence and interviews with 38 key informants to describe informatic practice and to illustrate the mutations—the natural change—introduced into the IT-mediated gaze by everyday, material practices This complicates both critical and euphoric claims about big data

'I had no credit to ring you back': Children’s strategies of negotiation and resistance to parental surveillance via mobile phones

Abstract: The monitoring of children in time and space, from a distance via the mobile phones, is a phenomenon never experienced in previous generations. Indeed, as frequently recited, the increased protection of children by monitoring them is a central characteristic of modern childhood (Rasmussen, 2003; Qvortrup, 1993) and the effects of this are not yet know. Equally our understanding of how children in middle childhood (8 – 12 years) negotiate and or resist this monitoring is unclear. This paper seeks to add to the emerging body of knowledge on the strategies employed by children in middle childhood to negotiate and resist the monitoring and surveillance of their physical selves in time and space using mobile phones. I suggest that the mobile phone can be transformed by children into a highly efficient device to enable them to both negotiate and resist surveillance thus increasing their autonomy and independent mobility. Children are not passive recipients of parental surveillance and power, rather they are increasingly playing an active role in negotiation with parents and actively resist monitoring of their everyday lives to both make meaning anew and produce culture.

Pandemics of the future: Disease surveillance in real time

Abstract: This paper explores disease surveillance systems in relation to preparedness, a security paradigm that strives to make future catastrophic events available for “real time” intervention in the present. I examine three different disease surveillance systems — the Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System, which is composed of physical laboratories and online information dissemination tools; Flu Trends, an algorithmic syndromic surveillance system; and EpiSimS and EpiCast, agent-based epidemiological modeling platforms—in relation to three different temporal logics of preparedness—tracking, anticipating, and projecting. These logical modulations all reflect different temporalities of preparedness, or different ways of making the future present, and there are two important implications of my attention to these logics. First, I argue these disease surveillance systems extend surveillance from the present into the future, constructing the very catastrophic threats for which they seek to prepare. Second, I argue the concept of “real time” on which preparedness depends arises from the technologies that construct this particular understanding of temporality. What’s more, the “real time” these systems construct is never the instantaneous erasure of the present; instead, I emphasize real time as multiple, as the proliferation of the present. At stake is an understanding of the ways in which preparedness establishes its own authority to make the future present by creating the very condition of unpreparedness it works to remedy.

Security Traps and Discourses of Radicalization: Examining Surveillance Practices Targeting Muslims in Canada

Abstract: Security agencies in Canada have become increasingly anxious regarding the threat of domestic radicalization. Defined loosely as “ the process of moving from moderate beliefs to extremist belief,” inter-agency security practices aim to categorize and surveil populations deemed at-risk of radicalization in Canada, particularly young Muslims. To detail surveillance efforts against domestic radicalization, this article uses the Access to Information Act ( ATIA ) to detail the work of Canada’s inter-agency Combating Violent Extremism Working Group (CVEWG). As a network of security governance actors across Canada, the CVEWG is comprised of almost 20 departments and agencies with broad areas of expertise (intelligence, defence, policing, border security, transportation, immigration, etc.). Contributing to critical security studies and scholarship on the sociology of surveillance, this article maps the contours and activities of the CVEWG and uses the ATIA to narrate the production and iteration of radicalization threats through Canadian security governance networks. Tracing the influence of other states – the U.S. and U.K., in particular – the article highlights how surveillance practices that target radicalization are disembedded from particular contexts and, instead, framed around abstractions of menacing Islam. By way of conclusion, it casts aspersions on the expansion of counter-terrorism resources towards combating violent extremism; raising questions about the dubious categories and motives in contemporary practices of the “war on terror.”

Studying Law Studying Surveillance

Abstract: The dialogue between law and Surveillance Studies has been complicated by a mutual misrecognition that is both theoretical and temperamental. Legal scholars are inclined to consider surveillance simply as the (potential) subject of regulation, while scholarship in Surveillance Studies often seems not to grapple with the ways in which legal processes and doctrines are sites of contestation over both the modalities and the limits of surveillance. Put differently, Surveillance Studies takes notice of what law does not—the relationship between surveillance and social shaping—but glosses over what legal scholarship rightly recognizes as essential—the processes of definition and compromise that regulators and other interested parties must navigate, and the ways that legal doctrines and constructs shape those processes. This article explores the fault lines between law and Surveillance Studies and considers the potential for more productive confrontation and dialogue in ways that leverage the strengths of each tradition.

Automated Experimentation in Walden 3.0. : The Next step in Profiling, Predicting, Control and Surveillance

Abstract: Big data technologies are increasingly able to automatically gather data, experiment with action strategies, observe results of such strategies, and learn from their effects. When privacy issues are framed as “control over information” it becomes apparent that some areas in the digital world might be heading to what I call Walden 3.0; communities of interest that are influenced and controlled by measurement and experimentation. Instead of bringing forward Orwell’s 1984 dystopia in the privacy domain as is typically done, I sketch how current developments might be better studied in the context of Skinner’s utopian novel Walden Two. I illustrate several issues through a running example from the domain of artificial intelligence, and by pointing to several areas where automated experimentation can arise. Finally, I raise questions on how to cope with and study the phenomenon of automated experimentation.

Watching the Watchers and McLuhan's Tetrad: The Limits of Cop-Watching in the Internet Age

Abstract: Video-taping police actions as a form of political activism—also known as “cop watching”—has been an activity which has garnered much scrutiny and media attention in recent years. Many hold the idea of cop watching as a realization of the democratic potential promised to us by the Internet. Primarily drawing from the theoretical lens provided by Marshall McLuhan, however, this essay argues that the medium is the message or, rather, the use of video clips shared through the internet may actually neutralize to some extent the political potential of this form of activism in many ways. As such, caution is warranted in over-emphasizing the power that video-activism may bring in halting or at least drawing attention to acts of police brutality and corruption.

Just Surveillance? Towards a Normative Theory of Surveillance

Abstract: Despite recent growth in surveillance capabilities there has been little discussion regarding the ethics of surveillance. Much of the research that has been carried out has tended to lack a coherent structure or fails to address key concerns. I argue that the just war tradition should be used as an ethical framework which is applicable to surveillance, providing the questions which should be asked of any surveillance operation. In this manner, when considering whether to employ surveillance, one should take into account the reason for the surveillance, the authority of the surveillant, whether or not there has been a declaration of intent, whether surveillance is an act of last resort, what is the likelihood of success of the operation and whether surveillance is a proportionate response. Once underway, the methods of surveillance should be proportionate to the occasion and seek to target appropriate people while limiting surveillance of those deemed inappropriate. By drawing on the just war tradition, ethical questions regarding surveillance can draw on a long and considered discourse while gaining a framework which, I argue, raises all the key concerns and misses none.

Gendering Surveillance Studies: The Empirical and Normative Promise of Feminist Methodology

Abstract: This paper argues that “doing Surveillance Studies” in a way that builds on and extends past research requires embracing the increasing call in the field to attend to gender, and embracing insights pertaining to feminist methodology and relatedly epistemology By reviewing the extant record and possibilities of attending to gender, the article shows how both the empirical and normative repertoires of Surveillance Studies may be emboldened and more nuanced discussions and understandings advanced Special attention is paid to how a project aimed at gendering Surveillance Studies may create new possibilities for enhanced attention to difference and identity, as well as surveillance in relation to both control and care

Surveillant assemblages of governance in massively multiplayer online games: a comparative analysis

Abstract: This paper explores governance in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), one sub-sector of the digital games industry. Informed by media governance studies, Surveillance Studies, and game studies, this paper identifies five elements which form part of the system of governance in MMOGs. These elements are: game code and rules; game policies; company community management practices; player participatory practices; and paratexts. Together these governance elements function as a surveillant assemblage, which relies to varying degrees on lateral and hierarchical forms of surveillance, and the assembly of human and non-human elements. Using qualitative mixed methods we examine and compare how these elements operate in three commercial MMOGs: Eve Online, World of Warcraft and Tibia. While peer and participatory surveillance elements are important, we identified two major trends in the governance of disruptive behaviours by the game companies in our case studies. Firstly, an increasing reliance on automated forms of dataveillance to control and punish game players, and secondly, increasing recourse to contract law and diminishing user privacy rights. Game players found it difficult to appeal the changing terms and conditions and they turned to creating paratexts outside of the game in an attempt to negotiate the boundaries of the surveillant assemblage. In the wider context of self-regulated governance systems these trends highlight the relevance of consumer rights, privacy, and data protection legislation to online games and the usefulness of bringing game studies and Surveillance Studies into dialogue.

Creative Misuse as Resistance: Surveillance, Mobile Technologies, and Locative Games

Abstract: By focusing on loctive, mobile games that utilize GPS tracking in playful ways—from games such as geocaching and GPS::Tron to artistic GPS projects like Paula Levine’s San Francisco Baghdad and Jeremy Wood’s GPS drawings—this paper points to two key issues for the intersection of surveillance and games. First, I argue that games can creatively misuse surveillance technologies as a form of resistance. Second, such creative misuse creates a particular embodied relationship to surveillance, what I term the “sensory-inscribed body.” Ultimately, the sensory-inscribed body, through creative misuse of locative tracking technologies, demonstrates that surveillance space is not statically inscribed with meaning; instead, the meanings emerge through practice. Playful engagement reinscribes the possible meanings, positioning the embodied player not simply as an object of surveillance but instead as a creative misuser who brings together heterogeneous elements to reconfigure spatial relationships between people and surveillance technologies.

Gaming Privacy: a Canadian case study of a children’s co-created privacy literacy game

Abstract: This paper reports the process and outcomes of the design of a game that educates children about management of privacy online. Using a participatory action research process, children worked with the researchers to develop and play a game which simulates certain aspects of online privacy management and allows for scaffolded experiential learning in a safe environment. The game allows children to develop autonomous skills and understandings, not only for more effective learning but also because it is only through autonomy that children can develop a sense of self which is necessary for understanding what it means to be private. The paper shows that children have quite sophisticated understandings of privacy, compared with some adult perceptions, and that these understandings include awareness of the risks posed by commercial organisations seeking to gather personal data from them. The paper shows how engaging children as research and design participants can lead to more successful approaches in the development of privacy literacy.

Game Studies meets Surveillance Studies at the Edge of Digital Culture: An Introduction to a special issue on Surveillance, Games and Play

Abstract: While we could attribute the close ties between surveillance and video games to their shared military roots, in this editorial we argue that the relationship goes much deeper to that Even non-digital games such as chess require a mode of watchfulness: an attention to each piece in relation to the past, present, and future; a drive to predict an opponent’s movements; and, a distillation of the player-subject into a knowable finite range of possible actions defined by the rules Games are social sorting, disciplinary, social control machines In this introduction we tease apart some of the intersections of games and surveillance, beginning with a discussion of the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden on using games to both monitor and influence unsuspecting populations Next, we provide an overview of corporate data-gathering practices in games and further outline the production of manageable, computable subjectivities Then, we show how the game Watch Dogs explores the surveillant capacities of games at both the game mechanical and representational scales These three different facets of surveillance, games, and play set the scene for the special issue and the diverse articles that follow In the following pages we pose new lines of questioning that highlight the nuances of play and offer new modes of thinking about what games - and the processes of watching and being watched that are a foundational part of the experience – can tell us about surveillance

Coerced to Leave: Punishment and the Surveillance of Foreign-National Offenders in the UK

Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London among foreign-national offenders facing deportation from the United Kingdom, this paper seeks to examine how foreign-national offenders experience and understand state policies of control. Worldwide, foreign-nationals are increasingly subject to forms of state surveillance, not just when crossing borders but also during their stay within a given state’s territory. Detention centres, weekly or monthly reporting requirements, and electronic monitoring are already common migrant surveillance strategies allied to deportation policies in many countries across the globe. These forms of state control are conceived legally as administrative practices necessary to control foreign-nationals whose status is still being adjudicated and to enforce the removal of unwanted foreign-nationals. Consequently, these strategies are not inflicted through a judicial process, even though these same practices are used within the context of penal incarceration and supervision. The lived experience of deportability and associated state surveillance highlights the punitive and coercive effects of detention and related conditions of bail. Ironically, but perhaps not unintentionally, those who are deemed a risk and subject to surveillance and banishment are therefore constantly feeling vulnerable and in need of protection. Because they do not consider themselves a risk to society, the foreign-national offenders interviewed for this study understand state surveillance not as a measure of control, but rather as punishment for wanting to stay. In their eyes, it is designed to coerce them to leave. An examination of the experiences of detention and bail reveals how such forms of surveillance work to discipline deportable bodies.

“...when no one is hearing them swear” - Youth Safety and the Pedagogy of Surveillance

Abstract: In this piece I examine the production and proliferation of adult surveillance practices online through Internet safety discourses. Specifically, through an analysis of youth Internet safety curricula provided to adults, along with interviews with parents, law enforcement officers and school officials, I describe the mechanisms by which adults are positioned as agents of surveillance relative to social networks and youth Internet practice. As I argue, youth Internet safety discourses represent what can be conceptualized as a pedagogy of surveillance – reconfiguring both adult and youth conceptions of online practice in ways which establish “trusted adults” as final arbiters of risk and appropriateness, while casting suspicion on the everyday social practices of youth. Through the pedagogy of surveillance provided by youth Internet safety materials, parents and guardians are encouraged to conceptualize social networking sites and other information technologies used by youth as surveillance tools, rather than as social spaces. Additionally, these materials provide adults with a particular conceptual frame through which to make sense of youth sociality online, commonly interpreting everyday communication and actions from the standpoint of an imagined “21 st Century” employer.

Surveillance and Community: Language Policing and Empowerment in a World of Warcraft Guild

Abstract: A case study of a World of Warcraft guild explores the relationship between participatory surveillance, public discipline, empowerment, and fun. The guild under investigation in this paper is a self-labeled "safe space" guild for female, LGBT, and other minority members of the gaming population. To promote the safe space environment, the guild's members actively enforce prohibitions against offensive language. A comparison is made between the participatory surveillance model employed by the members of the guild and the top-down policies and discipline enacted by the parent company, Blizzard Entertainment; this comparison demonstrates the effects of co-existing models of surveillance in the game community. Furthermore, the effects of the guild's practice of public discipline of rule breakers are analyzed as a method of shaming that enhances the effects of the guild's rules. Finally, by examining reactions from members of the guild, personal and community empowerment are the outcomes of participation in the system. Recommendations are made to incorporate elements of participatory surveillance into games in conjunction with unilateral surveillance typically employed by game developers.

Surveillance and student dissent: the case of the Franco dictatorship.

Abstract: The rising of a powerful democratic student movement in Spain in the sixties represented a substantial stimulus to the repressive modernization of the Franco dictatorship. New containment strategies were adopted in the context of the counter-subversion and intelligence policies that the USA administration and their allies were also implementing. From this assumption, this paper analyzes the specific dynamics of surveillance on student protest, exploring the previous situation at university, the challenges introduced by the youth upheaval, the diverse responses of the establishment, the role of the American aid, and finally the consequences both for the dissidents and for the dictatorship itself.

Governing the Wild: Databases, Algorithms, and Population Models as Biopolitics

Abstract: This essay draws on interviews with conservation biologists to reflect on two interrelated aspects of the in situ – ex situ divide and its increasing integration: database systems and population management models. Specifically, I highlight those databases and software programs used by zoos in ex situ conservation settings, and the parallel, traditionally distinct, in situ databases and risk assessment models. I then explore the evolving technologies that integrate wild-captive databases and population models and, in particular, emerging metapopulation and meta-model approaches to small population management. My central argument is that, while still viewed by many as separate, the in situ and ex situ projects—and their respective elaborate administrative structures and models of calculation—are, in practice, increasingly bleeding into one another. The stories I tell here about the efforts to save the red wolf from extinction reveal the complexities of this integration. I also document how—in this process—a tiny group of experts translates data into algorithmic formats to generate standardized risk calculations that are meant to apply both universally and objectively. Applying Foucauldian and STS insights to the field of conservation biology, I argue, finally, that surveillance and biopolitics work hand-in-hand in this context to enable a comprehensive, effective, and unitary management of nonhuman population life, or “viability”.

Reporting From the Snooping Trenches: Changes in Attitudes and Perceptions Towards Behavior Tracking in Digital Games

Abstract: There is an undeniable growing trend among players towards unconditional acceptance of behavior tracking in digital gamesThis trend has muted one of the two interlocutors necessary for a transcendent Hegelian dialectic that finds a viable synthesis between a corporate thesis that attempts to gather more and more data aimed at maximizing profit, and an antithesis that seeks individual players’ interests and resists privacy-infringing practicesBoth as researchers and as professionals utilizing behavioral tracking, we believe it is essential to establish a dialectic relation with the users that we monitor and collaborate with An ethical synthesis can be found only through a negotiation of interests and methods between polarized corporate and personal desires

Surveillance by the Australian Media, and Its Regulation

Abstract: The print and broadcast media make extensive use of surveillance in order to gather information for publication. It is vital to democracy that they do so. A proportion of the media's surveillance practices are, however, excessive and abusive of individuals' needs and reasonable expectations. An examination of Australian law shows that it provides almost no recourse against these excesses and abuses. Substantial change is necessary to create a regulatory environment in which balance is achieved.

Exploring Terra Incognita: Mapping Surveillance Studies from the Perspective of Media and Communication Research

Abstract: This article attempts to map surveillance studies from the perspective of the academic field of media and communication studies; and to seek out boundaries, limitations, strengths and weaknesses of current research. To map out the territory and mark important points within the landscape, Surveillance & Society , a premier interdisciplinary and peer-reviewed journal in the field of surveillance, is used as a point of departure. Analysis of topics within the surveillance studies field is conducted based on 296 articles from 40 issues published between 2002 and 2013.

Child Location Tracking in the US and the UK: Same Technology, Different Social Implications

Abstract: Real-time location tracking of individualshas become relatively easy with the widespread availability of commercial wearable devices that use geographical positioning information to provide location-based services. One application of this technology is to allow parents to monitor the location of their children. This paper investigates child location tracking technology in the US and the UK and compares its privacy implications. Although overall the price levels and the technical capabilities are the same, we find that the features of the technology are different depending on the social context. This can be attributed to national regulations and law that shape how a technology can be used. These laws and regulations, influenced by cultural frameworks, values, and morality, differ considerably between the countries. Clarifying the expected impacts of technology on the lives of users and other stakeholders in terms of these contextual factors will help to inform public debate about technical possibilities and societal needs.