Data Studies 2021 // S10. Surveillance

Pablo Velasco // Information Studies // pablov.me

Plan for the day:

• Surveillance(s)
• Digital Surveillance
• Surveillance Capitalism

SURVEILLANCE(S)

Classic approaches to surveillance

• Sur-veillance: watching-over
• Disciplinary society
  Foucault, M. (1978). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
• Panoptic surveillance
  Elmer, G. (2003). A Diagram of Panoptic Surveillance
  • few observing many ("unequal gaze")
  • internalized regulatory gaze (governmentality)
• Sousveillance (inverted surveillance)
• Panspectric veillance
  Landa, M. D. (1991). War in the Age of Intelligent Machines
  • enabled by sensors and signals, instead of human senses

But also surveillance as everyday practice

• self-tracking
  Lupton, D. (2016). The quantified self
• participatory: watching each other, being viral

Social surveillance is the ongoing eavesdropping, investigation, gossip, and inquiry that consitutes information gathering by people about their peers, made salient by the social digitalization normalized by social media
(…)
the nature of "surveillance" dynamically changes based on the social role played by observer and observant
Marwick, A. E. (2012). Social Surveillance in Everyday Life

Persistent Surveillance Systems
e.g. Radiolab: Eye in the sky

1. Which devices/artifacts are tracking us now?

2. Which of them are obviously visible? Which are obfuscated?

3. Who is gathering this information? Do you know to what purpose?

DIGITAL SURVEILLANCE

• Digital Surveillance:
  • Bigger scope of data: CCTV, RFID, biometics…
• "Liquid surveillance"
  Bauman, Z., & Lyon, D. (2012). Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation
  • fluid, uncontained, pervasive monitoring
• Dataveillance
  Dijck, J. van. (2014). Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology
  • continous tracking of (meta)data for unstated purposes

Let's look at the exhaust data captured from your browser

1. Go to Panopticlick: https://panopticlick.eff.org/
2. Is your browser fingerprint unique? What does this mean?

Agre, P. E. (1994). Surveillance and capture: Two models of privacy

NOT mutually exclusive models!

Mathematical formalism

*Compstats in Brooklyn Nine-Nine (S01E15)

How do grammars of action happen?

1. Analysis: identification of fundamental units of activity
2. Articulation: formal specifications (grammar)
3. Imposition: normative force (organisation of action under grammar)
4. Instrumentalisation: social and technical means for maintaining the grammar
5. Elaboration: captured activity can be stored, inspected, audited, etc…

"The crime rate itself became the boss"

"The people who started running CompStat didn't understand it"

In the original design Data was the means, and eventually Data became the ends

Agre, P. E. (1994). Surveillance and capture: Two models of privacy.

SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM

[Surplus (value): earnings minus costs of materials and labor]

[Alienation: from products, but also of our own determination]

Behavioural data reinvestment cycle

Every action a user performs is considered a signal to be analyzed and fed back into the system (Hal Varian)

• "Surveillance Capitalism is not a technology; it is a logic that imbues technology and commands it into action" (15)

• "Machine intelligence" -> analysis, Machine Learning, prediction, recognition, modeling…

Hmm… Machine intelligence seems to be used quite broadly and I can't quite wrap my head around where the borders are. Google themselves refer to things like language translation, speech recognition and prediction as machine intelligence (Mathilde)

Recommendation systems
The Napoleon Dynamite problem

When we predict a visualization based on a sample of data and then feed more data to test the accuracy of our prediction in the visualization (Laura)

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-big-tech-makes-their-billions-2020/

Google's reinvesment cycle turns from "improving the product" towards "prediction of user behavour"

• Instead of 'fordist' production, Google UPI (user profile information) extraction and analysis tailored to advertisment (ends)

• Unique mix (means): behavioural surplus, data science, material infrastructure, computational power, algorithmic systems, and automated platforms ("machine intelligence")

"instrumentarianism" power -> shape human behaviour to other's ends

Behavioural knowledge, manipulation, and prediction: microtargeting as a combination of politics and consumer marketing, and the capacity of manipulation of affective states (O'Neil 2017)

https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/trackers-gephi-dmi/

DMI version (in development, but you can export directly to gephi): https://github.com/digitalmethodsinitiative/brightbeam

Also, tracker-tracker (exports to gephi): https://tools.digitalmethods.net/beta/trackerTracker/

Short activity: lightbeam

Install Thunderbeam-Lightbeam for chrome here

0. (remember to deactivate your blockers)
1. Navigate for a few minutes as you'll usually do. Try some google searches, news websites, or social media
2. How does your network look? Compare with others: are there trackers that repeat continually? (you may want to pay attention to the bridges and/or central nodes for this)

Try doing the same with your adblockers on. Is there a substantial difference? You can try different adblockers.