surveillance and expropriation of information

Surveillance and Expropriation of InformationJIA HUI DAIJAMES BRIGHT

Web 2.0 – Prosumption and Surveillance

Focus on - data sharing - communication - community - co-production

It is mass communication and self-sommunication .

Fuchs, C. (2010). Web 2.0, prosumption, and surveillance. Surveillance & Society, 8(3), 288-309

•Web 2.0” platforms and their economic organisation•Transformation of the internet - information to communication •Tim O’Reilly’s definition of “Web 2.0” – “Network as a platform, spanning all connected devices…”•Fuch’s different view on “Web 2.0” – claims need to be more modest?

Google Buzz – directed connected to GMail

Commercial social networking sites - storing, analyzing, and selling individual and aggregated data about user preferences and user behaviour to advertising clients in order to accumulate capital

Function- creating postings that are shared with contacts; sharing of images and videos; commenting on and evaluating others’ Buzz posts; forwarding of Twitter messages to a Buzz account; linking and integrating images uploaded to Flickr or Picasa, videos uploaded to YouTube, and posts generated on Blogger; and use of Buzz via mobile phones

Google Buzz is part of Google’s empire of economic surveillance. It gathers information about user behaviour and user interests in order to store, assess, and sell this data to advertising clients. These surveillance practices are legally guaranteed by the Buzz privacy policy.

Goggles An image recognition software that identifies objects that people take pictures of by mapping these objects with Google’s image database and then provides information about these objects.

Allows humans to intrude the privacy of others in public spaces through personal identification

Also allows Google to gather, assess, provide, and potentially sell real time data about the physical location of millions of people.

Surveillance by nation states and corporations aims at controlling the behaviour of individuals and groups.

Ogura’s (2006) and Gandy’s (1993) argues that a common characteristic of surveillance is the management of population based on capitalism and/or the nation state, we can distinguish between economic and political surveillance as the two major forms of surveillance.

How does Web 2.0 make a profit?

Web 2.0 is largely a commercial, profit-oriented machine that exploits users by commodifying their personal data and usage behaviour and subjects these data to economic surveillance so that capital is accumulated with the help of targeted personalized advertising.

Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure

•Outline of article•What has been enabled by the introduction of WIFI•The internet ‘cloud’ – Gmail and Google documents enabled with large amounts of storage space on Google servers for personal information

‘Computing is moving off your machine and into the cloud’ (Tanz, 2007)

“Cloud” computing is one in which users will rely on privatized communication networks and data storage facilities to access and manage an array of goods and services, from personal documents and music files to online shopping and e-mail.

Gmail and Google documents - provide users with large amounts of storage space on Google’s servers to store their personal documents and correspondence.

However, Google reserves the right to mine its rapidly expanding databases for commercial purposes.

•Collection of information has economic value •Andrejevic argues that “digital enclosure” is a more appropriate way to name the internet cloud, as a way of theorising about the “forms of productivity and monitoring facilitated by ubiquitous interactivity.”

Digital enclosures: The model of digital enclosure Is a way of theorizing the forms of productivity and monitoring facilitated by ubiquitous interactivity. The model of enclosure traces the relationship between a material, spatial process with two examples:

• Google’s proposed business model for equipping the city of San Francisco with free wireless internet access,

•Different levels of enclosures operate with varying levels of symmetry and transparency – e.g. Amazon

• The use of the interactive capability of the internet to enforce increasingly restrictive intellectual property regimes.

•The end of the article explains how this era of digital enclosure isn’t based on a loss of privacy but on the expansion in the form of private control – e.g. telephony •Private control – Chinese blogger Zhao Jing – blog was taken offline by government •Internet – free expression? Or expression reliant on private cooperation’s?

o The forms of productive data gathering enabled by private ownership of and control over interactive enclosures, wired or wireless, that render an increasing array of spaces interactive. o The model of enclosure highlights the ongoing importance of structures of ownership and control over productive resources in determining the role they play.o A form of exploitation.

References: Karatani, Kojin. 2005. Transcritique: On Kant and Marx. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Fernback, Jan and Zizi Papacharissi. 2007. Online privacy as legal safeguard: the relationship among consumer, online portal, and privacy policies. New Media & Society 9 (5): 715-734.

Ogura, Toshimaru. 2006. Electronic government and surveillance-oriented society. In Theorizing surveillance, ed. David Lyon, 270-295. Portland, OR: Willan

Tanz, J. (2007). Desktop, R.I.P. Wired, 15.04, March. http://www.wired.com/ wired/archive/15.04/wired40_rip.html. Last accessed April 10, 2007

Schiller, D. (1999). Digital capitalism: Networking the global market system. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Andrejevic, Mark. "Surveillance in the digital enclosure." The Communication Review 10.4 (2007): 295-317.