Day 16: Surveillance

Day 16: Surveillance 

Lets face it, no one is reading these at this point but I'm still going to give you my typical mediocre blog post.

If you didn't get a chance to read this chapter I really recommend going back and looking in to it. From this reading you should assume that essentially none of your info is safe. Facebook collects, uses and shares our personal data without full or clear disclosure.

The chapter starts with discussing revenge porn in a Marine Combat Stress support group. A picture was posted of a female cadet and in comments someone posted a picture of her topless (we can assume an ex of sorts). It was later discovered that this was essentially a revenge porn group!! With google drive links dedicated to countless private and personal images of women. Facebook eventually had the pics and links were removed along with the group but people still had the opportunity to download and keep these on their phone. The author argues that "men exploit power that visual exposure of women grants them." making social media anti social for these targeted women. "According to the research institute Data and Security, 4% of American Women and 10% of those under 30 years old have become victims of revenge porn. In the additional reading we see that there were very very few laws in regards to this topic until around 2015.

The other important points to cover are the three types of Surveillance that Facebook exposes us to (you can call these perches or viewpoints) which include: Commercial Surveillance, Audio and Visual Surveillance, and Cryptopicon Surveillance.

Commercial Surveillance is commonly used by Facebook  to provide our information to advertisers, and to use geo location to track you. There is no way to opt out of this. The book provides an example of a user who shared little personal information on facebook, finally decided to put his relationship status as married, was exposed to ads encouraging having an affair, deleted his relationship status and stopped seeing the ads. 

Audio and Visual can be better understood through movies such as "The Conversation" (1974) and "Enemy State of Mind" (1998) In "The Conversation" the character uses audio and visual surveillance to investigate private citizens while the character in the "Enemy State of Mind" "deploys the digital tools and techniques that have come to characterize our era of surveillance." The character later goes off the grid after doing high level work for a government organization. The biggest difference in the films is that the "Enemy State of Mind" is in the dawn of the of the Big Data era. With the advancements we have made in the past 20 years both of these films seem comical.

Cryptopticon Surveillance is  essentially an ecosystem of massive corporate and state surveillance. These are more "cryptic, hidden, scrambled and mysterious" Big Data is usually turned to as a tool of choice. "Scholars and analysts tend to emphasizes the availability of appropriate technologies"