New Media & Community - g42

The advent of new technologies and their increasing complexity have altered the methods for surveillance available in our society. New media, particularly the internet and cell phone, have played a great role in increasing the means for surveillance that the government, corporations, institutions, parents, employers, and even peers can utilize to monitor people’s behavior, whereabouts, and provide other personal information. Curry et al discuss the founding of the Emergency Response System in the US and the changes that the system has undergone with the burgeoning of new technologies. The emergence of wireless telephones affected the Emergency Response System drastically, as the system had to adapt to this new medium and include a means for discerning the location from which a cell phone call had been placed in order to provide emergency assistance, which is accomplished using the location of the cell base station. This development brought up great privacy concerns, as improper use of this information could be used to track and monitor peoples’ movements and whereabouts and other unacceptable purposes, which the authors denote as function creep. This notion is somewhat similar to Marks’ discussion about how the NSA could combine cell phone records obtained from the location of the base station receiving the call with other information, like social networking details, to gain more comprehensive data on individuals. Curry et al also discuss this similar use by mobile marketing systems, in which individuals’ locations could be mapped and combined with past behavior and demographics, demonstrating how information can be utilized and combined from different sources. However, a limitation of Curry et al’s article is that many of their propositions for the use of cell phone location determination are more speculative and are not yet realized, so many of their concerns may not truly be relevant. Curry et al also does not provide much or any empirical evidence to back up their assertions of future usage of such information, which provides a further limitation to the article.

Lyon’s article also discusses the potential for the combination of different forms of data through surveillance. Comparatively, Lyon is more concerned with the possibility that visual surveillance images, such as photographs and video taken from CCTV in shopping malls or department stores, can be “checked, stored, and compared” with other forms of personal data, allowing digital tabs to be kept on people. However, Lyon also views surveillance as a way to minimize risks and encourage maximum visibility, thereby promoting public safety rather than as potential violations of privacy as discussed by other authors. Zetter also talks about these means of visual surveillance, describing how privacy conference members sought to surveil the surveillers, taking pictures of cameras that were recording them in an attempt to determine how they would respond to being monitored. This article presents a negative view of video surveillance, as those involved in the surveilling activity felt that these organizations were keeping records of their actions and viewed these cameras as “offensive eyes”. This outlook is differing from some of Lyon’s sentiments in which he views such surveillance mechanisms as functioning to minimize risks and enhance safety. However, Zetter’s article does not present any empirical data about how surveillers react to being surveilled and instead merely discusses the reactions of a few people in this one specific test instance. The impact of surveillance reversal would be better determined if a more scientific study was carried out, utilizing empirical evidence.

The paper by Green also investigates surveillance in our modern society. Instead of primarily focusing on how the government and organizations use surveillance, as Lyon and Curry et al did, Green also delves into the surveillance and monitoring that takes place among peers, employers, and between parents and teenagers. She discusses how cell phones are increasingly used by parents to monitor their child’s whereabouts and activities and are used for emergencies and safety concerns. Green’s argument much relates to the studies by Ling and Yttri and by Ito and Okabe, both of which investigate this method of surveillance that parents utilize over their children. Green’s piece brings up many similar concepts to those discussed by these other two papers. Both Green and Ito and Okabe talk about the impact of cell phones on teenagers’ home lives; both studies discuss how teenagers prefer to use their cell phones in their bedrooms instead of the family’s landline to protect the privacy of their conversations and avoid the surveillance of their family members. Similarly, Green discusses the “parental management strategies” that teens often use to regulate their parents’ surveillance of them, such as saying that the battery ran out. Ling and Yttri delve into this concept, creating a parallel between the two works, as their paper discusses specific strategies that teens use to prevent parental regulation such as sending calls from their parents straight to voicemail. Green discusses how teenagers and parents idea about surveillance differ, in that parents define checking up on their kids via cell phone as concern for safety, while teens view it as “surveillance of their activities”.

Holson’s New York Times article about Disney mobile describes a further means of parental control over children, as this new cell phone technology allows parents to restrict their kids’ cell phone use and even track them using GPS technology built into the phones. This extreme form of surveillance gives parents unrestricted access to their children’s whereabouts and allows them to subvert parental management strategies discussed by Green and Ito and Okabe. This service also allows parents to restrict use during certain times, such as during dinnertime, which Ling and Yttri stated as one of the drawbacks of teenagers’ mobile telephony use, as cell phones allowed teens to have contact with their friends during traditional family times. Disney mobile would allow parents to further regulate cell phone use so that children’s attention could not be taken away from the family. However, this article does not much discuss potential downsides of this technology; it merely states that there could be additional uses for this technology, yet the author does not delve further into this implication of the technology, providing a limitation to the study.

Questions:

How else could the Disney Mobile technology be used and what would the drawbacks of these uses be?

Should more specific laws be enacted blocking combination of information from cell phone records with other forms of personal data collected by marketers or other corporations?