Dataveillance is the new surveillance. It is, in fact, a new, more refined, and arguably more powerful kind of surveillance. Dataveillance is the use of information communications technologies to systematically monitor, record, and store individuals’ activities by investigating and analysing the data trail that they – usually inadvertently – leave behind through their activities.

Dataveillance consumes all the data breadcrumbs we wittingly, but more often unwittingly, create whenever we use an ICT, or even when we are not using an ICT. For example, even when our smartphones are turned off they continue producing, emitting, and sharing data.

According to David Lyon, an expert on surveillance, dataveillance takes surveillance to a more granular level by being able to closely track individuals in the most intimate and private parts of their lives. Dataveillance not only tracks but automatically sorts individuals, based on their continuously surveilled data, into categories based upon their activities and behaviours. These categories are subject to differential consideration and treatment by various public and private actors in terms of access, eligibility, and opportunities. These differences mean that, in effect, our lives are increasingly being mediated and shaped by this new form of surveillance.

Moreover, as dataveillance increases, there is less transparency about who exactly is collecting all this data, let alone what exactly they are doing with it. Arguably most internet and ICT-based companies, security and intelligence agencies, and governments employ dataveillance technologies for their purposes, including for generating profits and ensuring social control. But it is not clear what data, exactly, they are interested in or focusing on; what data they consider important or not; what data they are collecting; what data they are keeping; what data they are using; why they are using the data; how they are using the data; who has access to the data; who, besides them, have access to and are using the data; how long are they using the data for and how long they will keep it; and for what ends are they using the data?

Dataveillance consumes all the data breadcrumbswe wittingly, but more often unwittingly, create

There are also serious ethical questions regarding dataveillance. For example, what kinds of data should be subject to surveillance? Are there kinds of data that should not be subject to surveillance? Should different kinds of data have different degrees of surveillance? Should only specific kinds of data in particular contexts be surveilled? Should all personal data – professional, academic, financial, social, medical, familial, sexual, religious – be subject to surveillance? Should the surveilled data be kept forever? Is the surveilled data useful after a set time has expired, let alone whether or not it was useful in the first place, or does it become harmful after a while? What could happen, both positively and negatively, with this data? What kind of responsibilities does this data impose upon those players doing the surveilling?

Photo: ShutterstockPhoto: Shutterstock

In Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection (Harper Perennial), Jacob Silverman argues that dataveillance is a result of our own constant voracious demand for more and more information. Silverman notes how this demand has three principal economic causes: “the rapid decrease in the cost of data storage, the rising belief that all data is potentially useful, and the consolidation of a variety of media and communication systems into one global network, the internet”.

These causes have helped develop a Silicon Valley-inspired philosophy that seemingly all problems can be solved with more information and that all areas of life can and should be digitised. This philosophy seems to promote more data as always desirable, and for most companies and governments, how that data is acquired is seemingly incidental. Silverman wryly observes how in light of this philosophy, for instance, “Google’s totalising vision – ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ – sounds like a public service, rather than a grandiose, privacy-destroying monopoly”.

Although the government and companies may claim that dataveillance is mainly used in altruistic ways, it is most often employed for their own particular purposes and profits. The government may claim that dataveillance helps prevent terrorism, but its main purpose is for social control. When questioned in congressional hearings, representatives of the US intelligence community reluctantly confessed that not a single terrorist attack was stopped by their dataveillance programs, particularly the phone metadata bulk collection program. Companies, especially Silicon Valley entities, may claim that dataveillance helps improve products, services, and customer experiences. But in so doing, your personal data is used to expand their operations, and by extension increase their profits, by using your personal data, which is then sold back to you as a better product, service, or customer experience. In other words, in many cases, your personal data is used by them to encourage you to purchase more from them.

Photo: ShutterstockPhoto: Shutterstock

The World Economic Forum, which announced data as the oil of the 21st century, considers a person’s data as equivalent to their money, residing “in an account where it would be controlled, managed, exchanged, and accounted for just like personal banking services operate today”. It further encourages us to “think of personal data as the digital record of ‘everything a person makes and does online and in the world’”. Silverman recognises that “because everything would be tracked, everything you do would be part of some economic exchange, benefiting a powerful corporation far more than you”.

Indeed, since nearly everything we do produces a digital record, and a resulting data trail, much of human life could conceivably be incorporated into one vast, automated, networked dataveillance system. This dataveillance system is becoming more of a reality with the fast-growing internet-of-things, that is, internet-connected, sensor-rich devices on basically everything imaginable including appliances, clothing, furniture, buildings, infrastructure, vehicles, books, toys and medication.

Much of human life could conceivably be incorporated into one vast, automated, networked dataveillance system

According to Silverman, “no social or behavioural act would be immune from the long arms of neoliberal capitalism”, companies, and the government.

Ironically, however, many individuals are complicit in dataveillance. Lyon faults our seeming obsession with public disclosure of personal information – through, for example, social media activities and self-tracking behaviours – with helping to fuel and support the dataveillance abilities and practices, particularly of more powerful players like companies and governments.

These more powerful players are able to acquire a lot of this personal data for their own purposes and profits, in considerable part, because of our own complicity in data-fying ourselves.

Most of us do not realise, not to mention think about, how our ICTs are sophisticated surveillance devices. According to the sociologist Gavin Smith, our ICTs are turning us into so-called walking sensor platforms. We are “the subjects of an array of sensing devices that act to convert bodily movements, actions, and dynamics into circulative data”. Smith observes how this data production expels a kind of data exhaust, or leaves behind a data trail, that he describes as “flows of personal information that establish a representational data-proxy” of ourselves.

Further, the resulting representational data proxies “paint a virtually intimate portrait of a person’s habits and situation, a networked impression of self”. It ultimately serves as a kind of abstracted figure of a person, created and reinforced by the amalgamation of data traces from a world increasingly filled with data systems and networks.

Dataveillance consequently presents serious challenges to privacy and security, especially on a personal level, because of its dehumanising data collection, administered by powerful privately owned and controlled algorithms, for persistent surveillance purposes. There are some possible solutions to these challenges.

First, and perhaps most importantly, we must break our seeming addiction to information. As Smith argues, we must find “a way to stem our informational appetite” and accept “that our hunger for more information has social, economic, and cultural consequences”.

Second, data regulations should be designed and enforced to reign in and monitor the dataveillance processes and practices of ICT and internet companies, data brokers, and certain government agencies. For example, regular audits should be conducted on these players to monitor their data collecting, recording, analysing, and sharing practices and impose meaningful fines for non-compliance with data regulations.

Third, legislation should be enacted to guard against any kind of data-based discrimination.

Fourth, these powerful players should be more transparent in their activities. For example, they should inform users about why and how their personal data is monitored, recorded, stored, shared, and used for particular reasons, like how it may be used to shape advertising.

Fifth, we must try to encrypt as much personal data as possible. The more encryption there is in place, the more likely personal data will be secure from unauthorised dataveillance.

The reach of dataveillance exceeds the wildest dreams of the former feared East German Stasi. And in many ways we are complicit in its reach. This refined form of surveillance continues to expand at an alarming rate, capturing and data-fying ever more intimate parts of our lives. It is time to regulate its reach and reign in its excesses.

Marc Kosciejew is head of department and lecturer in the Department of Library Information and Archive Sciences in the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences, University of Malta.

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