5 Surveillance and Technology

Surveillance and Technology

This week we’ll talk about some academic research and analysis on the state of surveillance and digital technologies in our culture.

The Panopticon, Power, and Government

I’m going to start this unit with a story about a prison design, and I promise it ties back to social media surveillance in ways that are important to understanding how surveillance is effective.

The image above is called a Panopticon, a model of a prison originally sketched by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1785. This model for a prison is a circle, with all the prison cells located in a ring around the outer edge with open bars facing toward the center. In the center is a guard tower that allows prison guards to see into any of the prison cells along the outer ring. While the guards can see into every cell, the windows to the tower obstruct the view of the guard, so the prisoners cannot see the guards inside. Bentham’s goal for this design was to control the prisoners with as few guards as possible.

How did it work? If a prisoner acted in a way that violated the rules, the guard in the central tower could see it happen, and could call a guard on that floor to come and discipline the prisoner. So let’s imagine that you are in this prison, and you hear your neighbor acting out, and shortly thereafter, a guard comes to punish that prisoner. After this happens a few times, you will likely learn that someone is always watching you, and you’re less likely to violate the rules because there is always the potential that you’re being watched by the central guard tower (regardless of whether you are actually being watched at that particular time). So, because we always have the potential of being watched, we alter our behavior to follow the rules.

While there are a number of prisons that still do use this configuration to control prisoners, there are many other ways this same philosophy operates among the general population. For example: let’s say you are driving in the middle of nowhere, and you come to a red light. You can clearly see no one is coming in any direction, and it is safe to run the red light. Yet, most people continue to wait at the red light until it turns green. Why? Some for fear of safety (you don’t want to be wrong and get hit or hit another car). But for many people it is the fear of getting caught. Maybe there is a police officer hiding in a turnout just past the intersection. Maybe that traffic light has a traffic camera, and the police will mail you a ticket for running the light. The list goes on. The point is, we alter our own behavior to better fit with the rules because we are always potentially being watched.

So, what does this have to do with social media and surveillance?

Well, on social media, we are always being monitored and tracked, and scholars who study this form of surveillance say that we alter our behavior online out of fear we are being monitored. For example, I once dated someone who admitted to monitoring my email and text messages for months without me knowing (what a creep). To this day, I still monitor what I say via these communication methods, knowing there is always the potential these messages will be shared. (Don’t worry, I went to therapy.) The point is, knowing we might be watched means we alter our behavior and are more likely to follow the rules of “normal” behavior.

In fact, many social media scholars refer to social media as the Super Panopticon, because its power to monitor everything we do is more accurate and efficient than ever.

Asymmetrical Surveillance

Asymmetrical surveillance is when the power/informational relationship between people and governments/corporations is not equal – one side has more power than the other in gathering and sifting through data than the other. For example, the government has a lot of power to gather information about you (they can learn basically anything about what you do, where you travel, etc, that they want to know). You don’t have nearly as much power to gather information about the government. Sure, you can read investigative journalism about government practices, and yes, you can file Freedom of Information Act requests to find out information. But, that is not the same as having relatively open access to the amount of information the government has access to about you.

This is also true of corporations. This week’s reading is a now-famous example of Target stores using data surveillance to monitor their customers’ behavior. Basically, Target used data to discover that new parents were very loyal consumers (they are tired and don’t have much free time, so they often go to one store, get everything they need, buy familiar brands instead of comparing at the point of purchase, and get back home). So, they realized that if they could create loyal consumers while someone was pregnant, they would increase the likelihood that person would continue to shop at their store for years to come.

What did they do? They looked at their baby registry, in which parents list their due dates and personal information. They then compare that due date to data they kept about that consumer’s purchasing habits (by monitoring and storing information linked to their credit card payments), and found out what types of things women would buy when they first became pregnant (things like particular types of lotion, vitamins, purses large enough to be diaper bags, etc). Then, they created an algorithm that monitored when women would start purchasing those items together, and would then target them with ads and coupons for baby things (diapers, cribs, etc.). According to the article:

“About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

…

Using data to predict a woman’s pregnancy, Target realized soon after Pole perfected his model, could be a public-relations disaster. So the question became: how could they get their advertisements into expectant mothers’ hands without making it appear they were spying on them? How do you take advantage of someone’s habits without letting them know you’re studying their lives?

…

“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

So, in this sense, the data relationship is asymmetrical. Target can gather all sorts of data on you, but you cannot gather nearly as much data on Target.

In many cases, companies will offer you small incentives that increase the likelihood you’ll take advantage of their data tracking devices. Here are a few examples:

Retailers in Dressing Rooms

5 Retail Technologies in 2020

We also know this is done through the US government. This op-doc from the New York Times takes a look at the start of the NSA’s spying software and shows what it is capable of producing. You’ll recognize the interviewee from the Snowden documentary.

The Program – New York Times Op-Doc

So, how does the NSA get into your individual computer to gather your data? Here’s a quick guide.

Lateral Surveillance

Lateral surveillance is the everyday forms of surveillance we engage in all the time: using social media to see “what people are up to.” It is the low-key information we share about ourselves and the information we gather from monitoring the posts and online behavior of others. This type of surveillance is lateral, meaning it is equally available to both people in the surveillance relationship. If we are friends on social media, I can monitor your posts and you can monitor mine.

For example, do you Google a potential date before you agree to go out with them? Most people say yes, they do. They view that information as vital to maintaining their safety, and say things like, “What if this person is a murderer and I don’t look them up first?” We take it upon ourselves to engage in this form of surveillance to get to know things about others as part of our “responsibility.” So, we expect to engage in this form of surveillance, and we also know that other people expect us to be watching them. Friends will often say, “Did you see my post about…?” This suggests they expect that I should have seen it and that this is how I would likely learn about that information.

Lateral surveillance requires thinking of power as part of every social relationship. We all have the power to monitor the social media activity of our peers, and we expect reciprocal surveillance on our own activities. So, you might justify engaging in some low-key monitoring of an ex by saying they are likely doing the same to you. Or, it is okay if I creep on this person’s Snap Stories, because I saw last week that they creeped on mine.

Fitting with the idea of the panopticon, because we expect other people to be monitoring our social media habits, we tend to police our own behavior on these mediums. Research shows that we choose to share or hide particular pieces of information based on:

• Self-presentation: we want to project a particular image of ourselves, so we selectively share information about ourselves to maintain that image.
• Polymedia “rules” for social networks: We share some information with our friends on SnapChat that we would never share on Facebook, for example. Often this is based on the expectations for that particular application (what we post to Twitter vs what we post on TikTok) plus the expectations of the population likely encounter that information (our close friends vs our grandparents and parents).
• Trying to elicit a particular reaction from other people: For example, the people who post fishing messages like, “Today is just not my day…” and expect people to respond begging them for more information. Or, perhaps we post things to social media in hopes of making someone jealous.

The Work of Surveillance

Scholars who study lateral surveillance suggest that all this watching is actually work. We spend hours of our day sifting through the information our friends post and expect us to know. We spend great amounts of time taking and posting these images as well. Sometimes this work seems fun and like a really great and uplifting distraction from our “real work.” But sometimes, it feels like a chore to keep up with it all.

And data tells us that we spend a great amount of time producing and self-editing the content we produce. In fact, Facebook shared an internal study where they looked at 3.9 million posts that users typed into the status box but deleted without sharing. Yes, that’s right. Facebook stored the posts you typed but ultimately deleted without ever having shared it. (::creeps::). They used that data to see what kinds of posts people elected not to share and who was least likely to share the content they created, in hopes that they could alter the options to increase the likelihood that we would continue producing free content for their site.

This lateral surveillance of our own content production and sifting through all this content also helps to concentrate power for asymmetrical surveillance in the hands of media owners. The more time we spend on Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, TikTok, etc., the more likely it is that those apps are gathering, storying, and sifting through our data. In fact, as stated in the video above, Facebook gathers so much of our data, that when the NSA wants to access the computer of an intelligence target, one common way they do so is to disguise themselves as a Facebook server.

Privacy

Privacy has been defined in a number of different ways over time:

• 1890s: the right to be left alone (meaning neighbors wouldn’t physically come to your property and look in your windows/spy on you)
• 1967: “Privacy is the claim of individuals, groups or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.”
• 2000s: Above definition is changed to say that we don’t control this information, but at least we have the right to appropriate the flow of personal information
• Privacy today: The ability to control what information one reveals about oneself over the Internet AND the ability to control who can access that information.
  • This idea of privacy is difficult because we often don’t know what we are consenting to when we “agree” to user agreements. We don’t have access to who is using our data and how. And we often cannot control what they do with that information and who that company shares it with once they have it.

We also voluntarily give up our right to privacy online in a number of ways:

• We consent to having our data tracked.
• We post personal information, images, dates, selfies, our location, our travel plans, etc.
• As stated by media scholar Henry Giroux, our own desires in sharing our personal information and selfies contributes to commercial interests of major corporations and has ramifications for our individual and political freedom.

So, most social media scholars say that social media is BOTH a technology of freedom and a technology of invasion. As a technology of freedom, we use social media to form connections with others and gain information we would not have access to otherwise. BUT, social media is also a technology of invasion, meaning that we use social media to invade the privacy of others, and many companies and organizations also use social media to invade our privacy.