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Presentation
The ethics of observation: who is watching who?
New Media Technologies and the Culture of Control (2015)
  • Katina Michael, University of Wollongong
Abstract

Internet-enabled personal devices are rapidly proliferating: from tablets to smart phones and from drones to smart watches. Public transport hubs and networks increasingly are also relying on e-tags and opal cards for stored value transactions between destinations, and financial institutions have long used ATM cards and credit cards for analysing consumer spending patterns. Yet today biomedical pacemakers are even recording intimate heart and brain activity in patients. With each user movement commensurate equipment is used to identify, locate, and monitor individuals. Whether it is acquiring coordinates from a global positioning system, mobile base station, wireless access node, entry/exit gateway, train or bus station or motorway, authorities now can corroborate vital pieces of information to bring time, distance, speed and directional information together. You might love your fitbit now, but one day it might be used for more than just telling you how well you’re fairing against your personal best. While the average consumer is seemingly unaware of the data being generated by new media they purchase, private corporations and public agencies are investing in even greater cloud solutions for storing even more consumer data. Legal entities now have a plethora of options to go on in any given case. In actuality, we are living in a society that is drowning in evidence. Despite the inaccuracies, courts, law enforcement, insurance companies, employers, and schools even care givers will try to use various data to prove or disprove something. Will this push for 24x7 alibis lead to a society where those who do not swipe, scan or tap and go are automatically under suspicion? Will people begin to rent an eye in the sky that is all-seeing and all-knowing, a type of guardian drone to stave off unnecessary attack? This presentation seeks to consider the implications of private dash-cams for individual behavioural tracking.

Keywords
  • watching,
  • gaze,
  • surveillance,
  • sousveillance,
  • uberveillance,
  • power,
  • control,
  • equiveillance,
  • adoption,
  • internet of things
Publication Date
October 3, 2015
Citation Information
Katina Michael. "The ethics of observation: who is watching who?" New Media Technologies and the Culture of Control (2015)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/kmichael/551/