Dataveillance and Consumer Discipline was probably my favourite topic out of this module mainly because we were assigned to do it for our presentation and I was able to research into the topic much more closely and in depth.

During our presentation, we talked about the actual meaning of dataveillance, data quantification and applied dataveillance examples and shared them with the class. One of the most interesting things I learnt during my research was that, from birth, or even beforehand, we are monitored and there is data being collected about us. Even in utero, we have ultrasound images and information and it continues from there.

Sadowski (2017) thought it would be interesting to create “snapshots” of what future dataveillance might be like and it was quite a thought-provoking concept as this ‘idea’ of the future seemed quite over-the-top and scary. He mentioned that “the aim is for people and places to be totally monitored, measured and managed” which means that a sense of freedom within humans get lost. This is because ‘security’ and ‘surveillance’ is essentially put in place because they are trying to eliminate risk and danger.

Another interesting thing that was mentioned was the court-case related to Mark Zuckerberg and how he leaked the information of millions of people to Cambridge Analytica. This riled up a debate in class where everyone got involved and stated their opinions which was really useful as it meant that everyone was paying attention and learning about the topic of dataveillance through interaction.

Finally, we did a little class quiz to see whether or not people noticed the dataveillance that surrounds them every single day. After gathering data about the surveillance cameras in the library, we asked how many cameras the class thought there were in the whole library and everybody guessed that there were more than 100, when in actual fact, there are only 24 cameras altogether in the whole library.

Bibliography:

Sadowski, J. (2017), “Access Denied: Snapshorts Of Exclusion And Enforcement In The Smart City”, in Our Digital Rights To The City (Meatspace Press), pp. 6-11 <https://ia601900.us.archive.org/25/items/OurDigitalRightsToTheCity/Our%20Digital%20Rights%20to%20the%20City.pdf&gt; [Accessed 8 April 2018]

Image Reference:

https://www.istockphoto.com/gb/photos/digital-identity-loupe-and-computer-screen-with-binary-code?excludenudity=true&sort=mostpopular&mediatype=photography&phrase=digital%20identity%20loupe%20and%20computer%20screen%20with%20binary%20code

Written and Published by Raha Salehi.