The New World of Surveillance

            As mentioned in my blog last week, the dangerous dystopian future of surveillance is no longer based on the Orwellian or panopticon-style. The government will never pay to watch every corner of the Earth and every room. Instead, the real danger of oppression is from citizens themselves. As cameras continue to grow tiny, and assuming people begin wear cameras on themselves, as in Google glass, the threat of a rolling recorder may become omnipresent.

            While the rise of the autonomous car should vastly cut down on the 30,000 yearly road deaths, every running car will likely become a 360-degree, always-recording camera. There might be an “off-switch,” but most drivers would probably want the ability to record every accident for insurance purposes. Furthermore, the watchful eyes of a camera would likely prevent car jacking.

            Ultimately, the result could be a public sphere where everything could be recorded. Daniel Solove considers the potential problems with this type of world in The Future of Reputation. He mentions that every little mishap in public could potentially be put on YouTube if one is unlucky. This is epitomized in the case of the “Dog Poop” girl, where a rude public gesture became the bane of one South Korean woman’s existence. Or, perhaps more tragically, in the case of the Star Wars kid, where a private, fun game of imagination accidentally became a YouTube sensation. This ultimately resulted in a student’s dropping out of high school and seeking psychiatric care.

            Not only does the Internet provide a spot to put up embarrassing content, it also provides a spot to comment on it rapidly. Dr. Alice Marwick and Dr. Danah Boyd comment on this in “The Drama.”  Social networks provide researchers a more permanent record of teen bullying, and they also display some of the worst teen antics.

            The worst of Internet bullying and gossip can be seen on anonymous cites, such as collegiateacb.com. With the freedom to insult their peers without the risk of peer disapproval, such sites become virally hateful.

Jeremy Bentham's panopticon...

Google!

            In The Googlization of Everything, Siva Vaidhyanathan argues we are at risk of an overwhelming influence from Google. Under its precept of “Don’t be evil,” Google has led us to stop questioning the good intentions of the company. Whether its attempts are good or bad, however, its effects are monstrous. Google has changed the way we think about problems “by crowding out other alternatives” (6). Every time we search on Google to solve a problem, we are subject to Google’s perspectives, and ““Its process of collecting, ranking, linking, and displaying knowledge determines what we consider to be good, true, valuable, and relevant” (7).

            Furthermore, Google’s massive collection of information has put our privacy at the whims of Google. Vaidhyanathan argues that Google will make us behave in a manner similar as to under Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, where the possibility that we might be watched will alter our behavior to fit in with that which we think is expected of us. Only instead of a single viewer at the center of the Panopticon, or simply Google’s employees, we will soon fear the entire world is at the center of this Panopticon.

            Great Britain currently has 14.2 million security cameras set up right now, or one for every fourteen residents. While this is somewhat frightening in an Orwellian sense, what is scarier is what is to come. If Google Glass catches on and becomes widespread, everyone will have a camera strapped to there head at all times. Conceivable, there could come a time where we might never know whether we’re being recorded. The risk of this is our potential to all have a Panopticon-style of thinking, which could result in Orwell’s concept of “group think.”