Rhetoric of Web 2.0 Organize and share information Interact - - PDF document

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The Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0: How Web 2.0 platforms act as

Infrastructures of Dataveillance

Michael Zimmer Department of Culture and Communication New York University www.michaelzimmer.org

Rhetoric of Web 2.0

• Organize and share information
• Interact within communities
• Express oneself
• Empower creativity
• Democratize media production
• Celebrate the individual
• Power of collaboration and social networks

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Externalities 2.0

• Increased flow of personal information
• Aggregation of data across the network
• Intelligent agents that predict your needs
• Rise of data mining
• Placing these tools in hands of all users.

Externalities 2.0

• Infrastructures of dataveillance
• Panoptic gaze
• Search 2.0
• Amateur Data Mining
• P2P Surveillance

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Panoptic Gaze of Dataveillance Panoptic Gaze of Dataveillance

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Panopticon

“The more constantly the persons to be inspected are under the eyes of the persons who should inspect them, the more perfectly will the purpose of the establishment have been attained.” “This being impossible, the next thing to be wished for is, that, at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he [the watched] should conceive himself to be so.”

Panopticon

• Perpetual

surveillance

• Minimal

effort

“induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”

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Panoptic Gaze

“There is no need for arms, physical violence, material

• constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which

each individual under its weight will end by internalizing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be a minimal cost.”

Panoptic Gaze

• Quintessential disciplinary apparatus of

modern, everyday life

– Home – School – Workplace – Hospital

“a whole complex mechanism, embracing…stricter methods

• f surveillance [and] more efficient techniques of locating

and obtaining information”

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Power via Panoptic Gaze

• Everyday functioning of power

– Panoptic sort (Gandy) – Social sorting (Lyon)

• Sorting ≈ Exercise of power

– (Foucault; Bowker & Star; Lyon)

“…sorts people into categories, assigning worth or risk, in ways that have real effects on their life-chances. Deep discrimination occurs, thus making sorting not merely a matter of personal privacy, but of social justice”

Panoptic Gaze of Dataveillance

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Panoptic Gaze of Dataveillance Dataveillance

• Collection and storage of personal data
• Systemic use of personal data in investigation or

monitoring of individuals

– Roger Clarke, 1988

• Rise of digital dossiers

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Digital Dataveillance

• Digital networking
• Data storage
• Processing power
• Interconectivity
• Aggregation
• Real-time analysis

Frequent shopper cards Intelligent transportation systems Electronic key cards RFID tags Biometrics

Internet Dataveillance

• Ideal infrastructure of dataveillance
• Widespread monitoring and collection of

personal information

– Cookies – Spyware – DRM – Clickstream

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Panoptic Gaze of Dataveillance Panoptic Gaze of Dataveillance

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Panoptic Gaze of Dataveillance Panoptic Gaze of Dataveillance

• Concrete, material effects

– Discrimination – Social justice – Personal freedom

“[The] impact of dataveillance is a reduction in the meaningfulness of individual actions, and hence in self- reliance and self- responsibility. …In general, mass dataveillance tends to subvert individualism and the meaningfulness of human decisions and actions”

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Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0

• Search 2.0
• Amateur Data Mining
• P2P Surveillance

Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0

• Search 2.0
• Amateur Data Mining
• P2P Surveillance

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Search as Center of Gravity

• 84% have used a search engine
• 60 million users send 200 million requests

per day

Search engines have become the center of gravity for people’s everyday information-seeking activities

(U.S. data)

Search 2.0

• Drive towards the “perfect search”
• Intuitive results based on past searches and

browsing history

• Perfect recall

“Like the mind of God”

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Dataveillance in Search 2.0

• Engage in dataveillance of users’ online

activities

– Server logs – Web cookies – User accounts

Dataveillance in Search 2.0

• Majority of users unaware of dataveillance

– DOJ v. Google – AOL data

• Some try to avoid dataveillance

– IP routing – Cookie blocking – Obfuscation

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Google’s Broader Dataveillance Infrastructure

• Dataveillance across all products & services
• Intellectual activities across the web as well

as the material world

Google’s Broader Dataveillance Infrastructure

• General information inquiries:

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Google’s Broader Dataveillance Infrastructure

• Academic research:
• News & political information:

Google’s Broader Dataveillance Infrastructure

• Communication & social networking:

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Google’s Broader Dataveillance Infrastructure

• Personal data :
• Financial data :
• Shopping & product interests:
• Desktop computer files:

Google’s Broader Dataveillance Infrastructure

• Internet browsing:

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Google’s Broader Dataveillance Infrastructure

• Over two dozen products & services
• Interconnected via cookies & Google

Accounts

Search 2.0’s Gravitational Pull

• Feedback loop ~ gravitational pull
• Database of intentions

Source of insight into what someone is thinking, not just what that person is doing

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Panoptic Gaze of Search 2.0

• Disciplinary power

– Deleted Gmail messages as evidence – Search history “neck snap break”

• Storage of records

– China – Brazil

Panoptic Gaze of Search 2.0

• Panoptic sorting

– Financial motivations – Profile users potential economic value “Google knows a lot about the person surfing, especially if they have used personal search or logged into a service such as Gmail”

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Panoptic Gaze of Search 2.0

• State of consciousness & visibility

– “My goodness, it’s my whole personal life…I had no idea somebody was looking over my shoulder”

• Tools to circumvent

– FoxyProxy – TrackMeNot

Resisting Search 2.0

• Expanding the infrastructure of

dataveillance:

• Easy to take at “interface value”

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Resisting Search 2.0

• Collection of personal information

becomes a prerequisite of participation

– “oscillates between seemingly rewarding participation and punishing attempts to elect not to divulge personal information”

• Default settings

Panoptic Gaze of Search 2.0

• Social, political, and technical infrastructure

that renders visualization meaningful for the basis of disciplinary social control

• Emergence of a “soft cage” of dataveillance

– Individual freedom – Concept of self – Social justice

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Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0

• Search 2.0
• Amateur Data Mining
• P2P Surveillance

Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0

• Search 2.0
• Amateur Data Mining
• P2P Surveillance

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Don, the Camera Thief

cyberwarrior@rogers.com

Lonelygirl15

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Farrand Field Farrand Field

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Amateur Facial Recognition Riya

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Riya Riya

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Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0

• Amateur Data Mining
• Peer to Peer Surveillance
• Search 2.0

Values in technology design…