SigInt10: Buying Privacy in Digitized Cities
Resistance is futile, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from myxi photostream
Modern city dwellers are being tracked in hundreds of ways. From cell phone surveillance to DNS tracking.
Eleanor illustrates the vast numbers of records generated by Joe Sixpack as he travels from his home to his desk in the office. You have been awake all of 2 hours and at least 30 government agencies and double that amount of commercial agencies have stored information about you.
There are a few problems around surveillance:
- Secondary uses
- Buying and sharing data
- Sunk cost
- Opportunity leads to abuse
- Equality versus aggregation
A typical telco gets about one location request per 10 subscribers, excluding 911, secret service and law enforcement requests.
Once a city has spent millions on a CCTV system, there is huge pressure on them to make the most use of them they can, just to prove it was a justified expense. Even if the citizens of the city disagree.
Even if information is publicly available, aggregation of information that the subjects of the information had no intention of disclosing is happening all the time.
In summary, surveillance is complicated, but is it good or bad?
Surveillance can be a life saver. Take the example of pace makers that send real-time heart monitoring data, or the fall down detection for solitary industrial workers.
Surveillance for marketing is hard to rate. Mostly this data is used to sell subjects stuff they didn’t want, but it may also lead to them learning of things they will be interested in which they otherwise would have missed.
There is surveillance that guards the privacy of the rich and famous. And there is fraud detection, it is mostly used for good. Unfortunately the data from fraud detection is also sold for marketing purposes.
There is actually surveillance for the common good. Such as water quality monitoring or traffic monitoring for road repairs.
There is surveillance for personal protection, alarm systems, CCTV and on-site guards are all available for a price.
Only a small portion of the surveillance in a city is actually there to stop crime, even if that is the selling goal.
Surveillance can be good and bad. It is a refection of the powers that be.
So how do we fix this?
- Let’s document the problem
- Raise awareness
- Work directly with existing projects
- Subvert the system
- Eleanor launched the Deployable Camera Competition: a contest that is aimed at designing a surveillance camera that can be used by civilians to do counter surveillance. The devices have to be released under an open source and open hardware license.
- The competition can be found here: http://sldrc.com/projects/deployable
Eleanor’s slides are here: http://sldrc.com/talks/SIGINT10-privacy.pdf