Way beyond Big Brother:
More than anything, social media have softened our aversion to being covertly watched by others. This is especially true among younger people, many of whom have not known a world in which theycan’t blog, tweet or text the details of their lives across the
Do you use Google? Drive a car? Use a credit card? If so, you are being tracked,
Do you have a smartphone, a credit card, a debit card, ID card, use Google, Gmail, Facebook, go to school, have a job, drive a car?
Then you are under surveillance — by government, by Big Business, by web analytic companies, retailers, data marketers and people like you. They know your name, address, job, religion, friends, interests, weight, web-surfing behaviour, buying habits, unsavory tendencies and billions of bytes of other data.
Retail titan Target quietly deciphers young women’s shopping data to accurately predict when they are in the second trimester of pregnancy. The chain tries to delicately hook them on its own baby products before they find those of other merchandisers.
An Italian company markets the EyeSee store mannequin with a facial recognition camera disguised as an eye to collect and transmit age range, gender, race and other data about passing shoppers.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is considering following the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by adopting automated technology to monitor Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites for the use of dozens of “suspicious” keywords like “alQaida” and “attack” to not-so-obvious utterances such as “initiate” and “pork.”
The Canadian Border Services Agency pulled the plug, temporarily, on a plan to “overtly” bug major airports with microphones last summer after the Citizen reported the agency had neglected to complete a mandatory privacy impact statement.
Facebook has expanded the bounds of public data mining with the gradual roll out last month of its Graph Search feature that generates very refined information based on the personal profiles, “likes” and other details posted by the social medium’s estimated one billion users.
Google, meanwhile, says governments and law enforcement hit it with a record 21,389 requests to hand over information about its users, including those on YouTube, which it owns, in six months ending Dec. 31. The company complied with two-thirds of the requests.
And, in yet another example of how information gathered for one purpose is increasingly recycled into government or police databases, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Monday gathered together large integrated computer companies and information technology firms at its Virginia headquarters to discuss the concept of using vast amounts of commercial data to pre-screen air travellers to speed up physical screening at U.S. airports.
The TSA says the set of data elements should include not just full legal names, gender, dates of birth, addresses and social security numbers, but, “biometrics, commercial data and other elements suggested by industry.”
Police have been doing the same for years. The RCMP, for one, began buying and storing personal information from commercial data brokers following the 9/11 attacks.
The confluence of the Internet, social media, mobile digital technologies, post-9/11 security fears and significant advances in fields such as facial recognition biometrics and data mining enables surveillance to flow almost imperceptibly through our lives. It gathers, monitors, measures and scrutinizes our likes, dislikes, insecurities, transgressions, associations and intimacies so that others can influence, sort, study, profile, investigate and seduce us.
One of the goals of all of this data gathering is to know not just what is happening, but what will happen, by predicting behaviours.
Canadian military researchers, for example, have taken a page from the 1956 science-fiction short story (and 2002 movie) The Minority Report by investigating the “biometrics of intent:” how deciphering brain signals might distinguish hostile intent from everyday emotions such as anger and fear.
Surveillance was once fixed, rigid and conspicuous, like the ominous watchtower in Jeremy Bentham’s architectural Panopticon and the relentless gaze of the telescreens that spied for George Orwell’s Big Brother.
But now, like modern life itself, surveillance is liquid, “always on the move … and spreading in hitherto unimaginable ways,” sociologist David Lyon, director of Queen’s University’s Surveillance Studies Centre, writes in his intriguing new book, Liquid Surveillance.
As CNN noted during the recent David Petraeus scandal, if the head of the Central Intelligence Agency and America’s No. 1 spy can get caught writing secret love letters to his girlfriend on Gmail, then nothing is private.
Anonymity is becoming an obsolete term. Obscurity is perhaps the best we can hope for.
More than anything, social media have softened our aversion to being covertly watched by others, especially and not surprisingly among younger people, many of whom have not known a world in which they can’t blog, tweet or text the details of their lives across the galaxy.
Attracting legions of Twitter “followers” and Facebook “likes” is a recreational pursuit for many and an obsession for some. It has transformed public personal disclosure into “proof of social recognition, and therefore of valued — ‘meaningful’-existence,” Lyon writes in his new book, co-authored by Zygmunt Bauman, the renowned social thinker behind the concept of “liquid modernity.”
What some don’t realize, Lyon notes, is that social media sites depend for their existence on monitoring users and selling the data to others.
“We submit our rights to privacy for the slaughter of our own will. Or perhaps we just concur to the loss of privacy as a reasonable price for the wonders offered in exchange.”
Whatever the case, we’re in a new kind of social situation where visibility is taken for granted, Lyon said in an interview. Invisibility is no longer an option.
“There is always some eye watching us. But the point is, it isn’t just one eye, there are many, many eyes,” he says.
Not all are menacing or seemingly sinister, of course.
Discerning our likes and dislikes can deliver convenience, comfort and efficiency, like the Amazon. com algorithm that informs book buyers that “customers who bought this item also bought ...” It personalizes and customizes the experience and helped Amazon earn more than $13 billion in 2012 third quarter revenue.
The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. has been praised by Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian for its cautious and considered use of facial recognition technology to exclude self-identified problem gamblers from its casinos.
Google Flu Trends tracks the use of the search terms related to the flu, such as “flu remedy” or “influenza.”
The London Daily Telegraph newspaper reports the app can pinpoint outbreaks one to two weeks ahead of traditional flu watch surveillance. That can only be good.
“Orwell could hardly have guessed that commercial surveillance would, a) be so tremendously important in its own right; b) be something with which people were so complicit; and c) something that would, in turn, feed into the very kind of surveillance that Orwell described with state surveillance, police and intelligence,” says Lyon.
“That is one of the more astonishing developments of the 21st-post9/11-century, because those same data — and not just individual details about persons, but profiles — are being used and passed from commercial sources to intelligence sources and security agencies and so on.”
Lyon traces the blurring of the distinction between public and private information to the advent of television, then telecommunications networks, searchable databases and now the Internet. We increasingly experience and share life not in real time and space, but in an electronic realm.
“We seem to experience no joy in having secrets,” he says. “The new technologies have introduced a huge amount of liquidity, above all in social media, and the relation between (what’s) public and private is so much more blurred and porous and contested. On a small scale you see it with Facebook. On a large scale, you see it with WikiLeaks.”
The dichotomy between the way society views being surveilled by the state versus being followed and watched by complete strangers on cool and absorbing social networking sites has not been lost on real spies.
It’s “odd how people don’t see the impact of their postings or sharing of personal data with entities that have no rules, but get bent out of shape if an investigative agency, under lawful authority, attempts to get access to a file with information collected for another purpose,” Ray Boisvert, former assistant director of intelligence for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said in an email interview.
“I get the distinction that’s if it’s a private company, it’s not ‘The Man,’ but the negative consequences seem equally if not more likely when in unaccountable hands.”
A case in point, he says, is Bill C-30, the proposed and contentious federal “lawful access” legislation that would give police, intelligence and Competition Bureau officers access to Internet subscriber information — including name, address, telephone number, email address and Internet protocol address — without a warrant. Release of such data, held by Internet service providers, is now voluntary.
And because even that limited data can be revealing, opponents say allowing authorities access to Internet subscriber information without a court-approved warrant would be a dangerous infringement of privacy.
Boisvert disagrees. He believes it would, in fact, put legal safeguards in place and regulate authorities’ collection of that information, where currently there are no such protections.
“People freely put stuff up on Facebook or volunteer tons and tons of very personal information to private entities who will exploit it to the nth degree,” he says, “but they get very upset if the government of Canada proposes to give its police and security agencies access ... but with new, strict rules.”
Even volunteering something as seemingly innocuous as your postal code (read: your lifestyle) to a store checkout clerk can, for example, help convince a grocery store chain to move from a poorer neighbourhood to one with a more upscale geo-demographic profile where customers are worth more to them.
Internet service providers and telephone companies can use the same information to provide faster online service to communities of valued addresses, says Lyon.
“So those areas that are already relatively advantaged get better service. Why? Because their so-called best customers are clustered there,” he says. But, of course, that has a negative effect on less advantaged neighbourhoods.
The exploding volume of global data has opened a new frontier in informa- tion management called Big Data — the increasing capability to quickly correlate and analyze colossal collections of unstructured data that is beyond the ability of traditional data-management tools.
On Facebook alone, 30 billion pieces of content, much of it very personal, are shared each month, while more than 30 million networked sensors are embedded around the planet in devices such as mobile phones, smart energy meters and automobiles, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.
In all, the human race creates an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day.
By managing Big Data sets, business, industry and government hope to have a powerful new tool to “connect-the-dots” in ways previously unimaginable.
The concept became mainstream news in November when Time magazine published insider accounts of how the campaign to re-elect President Barack Obama rode Big Data to a second term in the Oval Office.
Instead of traditional, multiple campaign databases, a single, massive system was created with the ability to “merge the information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states,” the magazine explained. The effort “helped Obama raise a record $1 billion in campaign donations, remade the process of targeted TV ads and created detailed models of swingstate voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media.”
Back in office, the Obama administration soon gave the little-known National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) Big Data power to examine any government files — from law enforcement investigations to health information and employment history, even travel and student records — on U.S. citizens for possible criminal behaviour, even if there is no reason to suspect them, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The stated intent is provide policymakers with greater situational awareness and warning of planned terrorist attacks. It’s no coincidence it comes after a series of counter-terrorism failures blamed on unseen intelligence data buried in the morass of U.S. national security databanks.
But the potential of Big Data has also prompted some experts to call for public debate on the privacy and personal security implications of this and other surveillance technologies and practices.
“Technology is emerging that allows us to be tracked at unprecedented rates by law enforcement and intelligence agencies without effective oversight,” says Rawlson King, a lead Ottawa researcher for the Biometrics Research Group Inc.
“How do we want these tools to be exercised? Do we want people to go in and simply mine all this data without our permission ... in criminal investigations or in terrorism investigations without warrants? That’s a very serious issue, especially when you start thinking about biometrics.
“If you’re in a (trusted) traveller’s program and your fingerprint is also linked to a Big Data clearing house that is also trying to collect all sorts of information about you — banking transactions to where you surfed online — that’s an incredible amount of power and insight that the government will have without legal mechanisms and protections and going to the courts to obtain warrants.
Other Big Data ventures are galloping across the national security horizon.
The FBI is working on a $1-billion update to its national fingerprint database that will incorporate biometrics such as facial recognition and iris scans, DNA analysis and voice identification. Another application will compare images of people of interest from security cameras or public photographs (250 billion photos are posted on Facebook alone) with the FBI national repository of images.
Privacy advocates worry that people with no criminal record who are caught on camera alongside a person of interest could end up in a federal database, or be subjected to unwarranted surveillance, according to New Scientist magazine.
Concludes King: “I’m not conspiratorial but we have to at least start thinking about the potential impacts of the technology.”