Today was all about surveillance. Dataveillance was a new term introduced to me which from what I understand essentially means the tracking and surveillance of yours or anyone else’s online data, be it public or private. In the seminar we were asked a question, how many cameras do we think there are total in the Cockroft library, pretty much everyone said a number around the low to mid 100s which really stuck me but my instincts told me that could not be possible so I said 50 and ended up being right and winning a doughnut. This made me think though, about how watched people feel, and how paranoid people must be if they really believe there are so many cameras everywhere.

Another interesting thing brought to my attention today was the concept of surveillance society, essentially meaning that with out forms of ID such as birth certificate, passport, driving licence, bank statements and so on we technically don’t exist in our society. The term data quantification was also introduced to me for the first time today also, this means the act of putting a value on an individual by using all the data that was collected through their cookies, internet searches, the use of loyalty cars for stores and so on. This bit kind of shocked me, I do not think that people should be valued based on details like those, but rather actual information about them and their knowledge/ education.