Tag: surveillance

Screening Surveillance: Mapping, Monitoring, and Future-Ing Big Data Surveillance

sava saheli singh
University of Ottawa

Screening Surveillance
https://www.screeningsurveillance.com

Gallery Project Statement

In light of recent surveillance developments — social media breaches, smart city ventures, and workplace monitoring — we need to pay more attention to and analyse the logics and practices that underpin, enable, and accelerate big data surveillance. As these interoperable systems map and monitor the movements and behaviours of populations, they cast long data shadows and draw inaccurate data portraits. The flaws of these systems remain points of academic discussion, but as these portraits are propelled forward in space and time perpetuating existing inequalities, more public input is needed on these futures and their implications for people and places.

As part of an international multiphase project on Big Data Surveillance, in 2018- 2019 the Surveillance Studies Centre, led by sava saheli singh, produced three short films speculating surveillance futures and the effects of deeply embedded and connected surveillant systems on our everyday lives. Intended as public education tools to spark discussion and extend understandings of surveillance, trust, and privacy in the digital age, each film focuses on a different aspect of big data surveillance and the tensions that manifest when the human is interpreted by the machine.

Blaxites follows the story of a young woman whose celebratory social media post affects her access to vital medication. Her attempts to circumvent the system lead to even more dire consequences.

In A Model Employee, an aspiring DJ has to wear a tracking wristband to keep her day job at a local restaurant. To her annoyance, it tracks her life during and outside of work, even using location-based surveillance to nudge her. She figures out a way to fool the system, but a new device upgrade means trouble.

In Frames, a smart city tracks and analyzes a woman walking through the city. Things she does are interpreted and logged by the city system, but are they drawing an accurate picture of the woman?

The films raise issues in our understandings of trust and surveilled relations, while making visible the underlying systems that map and manipulate us.

[Note: For an extended discussion of Frames, please see the companion paper “Vulnerable Bodies (Mackinnon and singh) which explores futures of the urbanite body and smart city surveillance.]

September 26, 2019 mappinginjustice 0

Vulnerable Bodies: Relations of visibility in the speculative smart city

Debra Mackinnon
University of Calgary

sava saheli singh
University of Ottawa

From wearables, IoT sensors, apps, platforms and cameras, we “shed” various forms of data as we navigate our increasingly networked and smart environments. Recent discussions of urban data have focused on post collection practices of translation and circulation – following data threads, journeys and exhaust as they enact urban life. We seek to further complicate these thick data accounts focusing on movement, bodies and embodiment. As our bodies become information, the accuracy and affordances of these data portraits remain critical sites of inquiry. How do surveillance technologies, map, render and perform human and non-human interactions; moreover, exacerbate injustice? In this paper, adding to the rich discussions of future-ing, anticipatory imaginaries and implications on the urbanite body, we offer a critical interrogation of the oligoptic gaze and the relations and politics of visibility. We do this through the narrative of Frames [https://www.sscqueens.org/projects/screening-surveillance/frames] – a speculative near future account of mapping a body through the various lenses of a smart city. Focused on what is included (and excluded) from the “frame”, we navigate domains of aesthetics and politics in order to foreground the embodied experiences, decisions and interactions which are mapped by these surveillant spatial locative technologies. We contend these renderings or simulacra of a ‘singular’ knowledge politic serve to stabilize and normalize ways of seeing, knowing and control. Yet, these rationalities are irrational – potentially producing inefficient, inaccurate and unjust portraits.

S7.2-Mackinnon_VulnerableBodies_MIJ2019Download
September 17, 2019 mappinginjustice 0

Who’s map? Everyday actions of spatial data resistance

Craig M. Dalton
Hofstra University

Jim Thatcher
University of Washington-Tacoma

Data is the lifeblood of mapping. Without it, even the most rhetorically powerful lacks substance. Recent counter-mapping by groups like the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and Argentina’s Iconoclasistas reveal how data can be powerfully repurposed in the right setting. In contrast, personal location data, whether big data or data science, tends to be the tool of major corporations and governmental initiatives, from Facebook to Google, the New York Police Department to the Chinese social credit system. Popular media suggest that people have little input or ability to influence how they are mapped and profiled, and subsequently advertised to or their movements blocked. In this paper, we seek to survey how people actively and passively resist and/or shape the collection and use of their personal location information, a form of everyday counter-mapping, as people attempt to exert influence over their data. We develop a typology of strategies of how people engage the production and use of their personal geographic data: acceptance, active resistance, making present, and escape. By identifying and cohesively conceptualizing such strategies, we aim to develop a series of approaches to exert more control over spatial data about oneself. We focus on strategies for two reasons. First, modes of resistance are highly contextual in terms of the political and social processes at work. Second, discrete technical efforts, such as turning off your phone’s GPS or using a VPN, can be quickly rendered obsolete or circumvented as technologies change in the continuing arms race of privacy and data capitalism. The strategies we hope to shed light on can adapt their specific implementations, remaining relevant and useful as conditions shift.

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September 17, 2019 mappinginjustice 0