The New Transparency Project at the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University launches an intriguing book on Thursday revealing the extent to which covert surveillance now invades our lives.
Transparent Lives: Surveillance in Canada investigates the ways government and the private sector gather, monitor, analyze and share information about ordinary citizens in Canada.
Nine trends identified by the authors, “raise urgent questions of privacy and social justice.”
1. Surveillance is expanding rapidly. Our newly digital existence has dramatically multiplied possibilities for surveillance. This expansion is readily visible in the everyday lives of our children. Seeing how profoundly a young child is touched by surveillance makes it clear that the processing of personal data influences many routine aspects of life.
2. The accelerating demand for greater security drives much surveillance. This is obvious in, say, an airport, but it is also visible in policing and even in workplace monitoring. It is not clear, however, that such surveillance makes us safer.
3. Public and private agencies are increasingly intertwined. Where surveillance was once conducted mainly by government or policing agencies, outsourcing has brought for-profit organizations into the surveillance arena. Corporate gathering of personal data now outstrips that done by police and intelligence agencies. Personal data from commercial databases are now sought and processed by government, significantly increasing the amount of information that governments collect about their citizens.
4. It is more difficult to discern what information is private and what is not. Your name or social insurance number clearly identify
you as an individual, but what about a group photo in which you appear that is later posted on Facebook or a picture taken by a traffic camera of your car licence plate number? Each can be used to identify or track you, and such identification can also be made through the combination of different forms of data.
5. Mobile and location-based surveillance is expanding. A growing number of organizations, from police to marketers, are interested in not only who you are (identification) and what you are doing (behaviour) but also where you are at any given moment. our mobile devices make us more visible.
6. Surveillance practices and processes are becoming globalized. Canada is far from unique in experiencing rapid surveillance growth. In fact, much surveillance originates in broader international policy changes. Airlines, for example, operate with similar routines worldwide. How we deal with this depends on specifically Canadian traditions, laws and cultures.
7. Surveillance is now embedded in everyday environments such as cars, buildings and homes. Increasingly, each of these basic elements of daily life features devices that recognize owners or users through technologies like voice activation or card swiping. Surveillance is thus becoming more pervasive and less perceptible.
8. The human body is increasingly a source of surveillance.Fingerprinting, iris scanning, facial recognition and DNA records are now commonly used to identify individuals. Our bodies become passwords, and delicate tracings of our body are some- times seen as more reliable than our statements and stories.
9. Social surveillance is growing. Social media have facilitated an explosion of digitally enabled people watching. This strend raises troubling questions about privacy while making surveillance seem more normal and less exceptional.
Source: ottawacitizen.com/
Author: IAN MACLEOD
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