Does privacy exist?
Today we live in a world where the lines of public and private spaces have been blurred by technology. We are constantly monitoring other people and we are constantly being monitored by others. It is hard to determine what information is private. Curry et al discuss the founding of the Emergency Response System in the US and transformations that it has taken with the onset of new technologies. The birth of the wireless cell phone drastically changed the Emergency Response System since it was now possible to track a cell phone call depending on the location of the cell base. This brought to light the concern of people being tracked and monitor for the wrong purposes, function creep. Tracking individuals’ location can also be used by mobile marketing systems, combining location data with past behavior, displaying the possibilities of how the combination of different sources could be used. The article provides many uses for the cell phone and location determinacy, but many of these are purely speculative and may not yet reflect reality.
Similarly, Lyon discusses surveillance through the combination of various forms of data. He discusses the possibilities of video surveillance images, including photographs and videos taken from CCTV in the public arena. Digital tabs can be kept on people by using the photographic information and combining it with personal data. Lyon does view surveillance as a means to promote public safety, regardless of the violations of privacy. On the other hand, Zetter presents the negative side of video and camera surveillance. As Lyon believes that surveillance is minimizing the public risk, Zetter discusses the intrusion of surveillance in regards to conference privacy surveilling the surveillance. They took pictures of cameras that were recording them to determine how they would respond to being monitored.
Green focuses his paper on the surveillance and monitoring between peers, employers, and between parents and their children. Green discusses the use of cell phones as a monitoring device for parents, who can now track their children’s exact whereabouts on their children’s cell phone. This article relates to our previous readings by Ling and Yttri and also by Ito and Okabe with parental monitoring via cell phones. Green also discusses the use of cell phones within the private, family sphere, in place of a landline that protects their conversation privacy. She presents the differing ideas about surveillance between parents and their children. Teenagers see cell phone surveillance as a way that their parents can monitor their activities. On the other hand, parents view cell phone monitoring as a means to protect the safety of their children.
Finally, Holson’s article from the New York Times is about Disney mobile, furthering our discussion about parental control. Disney mobile allows parents to control the amount of time their children have on their cell phones and it also provides parents with GPS technology to track their children. This technology allows parents to control the use of their children’s cell phones within the home, and also during other inappropriate times. By using this, parents can restrict their children from using a cell phone during family times. The GPS tracking aspect of the Disney mobile allows parents the intimate information about their children’s whereabouts. This prevents teenagers from lying about where they are going. This article does not present the negative aspects of this technology, which is vital in our full assessment of the technology.
Questions: How distant is a GPS tracking device in a cell phone that can also record the cell phone users that are closest to the cell phone? Thus, will technology dive further into our privacy by providing parents with the ability to know who exactly their children are with? Also, we have discussed the use of parental surveillance with cell phones, but how much information can the government extract from this technology? Will we eventually live in a world where there is no such thing as a private space?