NOT AS PRIVATE AS YOU THINK 

By Emmanuel Koutsouras 

Say you are browsing the internet, maybe reading a movie review, looking through amazon to find a video game you want. Then you decide to go on Instagram sometime later and see an ad for something closely related to that movie review or video game. Social media is arguably the largest collective platform of information that the world has ever seen. There probably is not a single person who is completely off the grid. Social media brings people, ideas, thoughts, facts, and opinions together, in a way that nothing else can do. People put so much of their personal information on the various social media platforms, assuming safety as a given. As is the case with most things in life, nothing is a guarantee, though. The power of surveillance, which when you think about it is truly disturbing is “that people whose personal data are collected or observed may not know when or if they are being watched” (Humphreys, 2008).  

 

The process of surveillance is typically carried out across multiple systems, bureaucracies, and social connections all converging into “surveillant assemblages” and embedded within everyday life (Lyon, Haggerty, & Ball, 2012). Social media sites are increasingly resembling such assemblages, as they draw in data on user activity elsewhere on the internet via “cookies” and other tracking mechanisms, this how you see ads for things on social media you were looking up on a different website (like a video game on amazon), and from other sources of information on users, such as retailer loyalty cards, customer surveys, and smartphone location traces. Surveillance is an ancient social process, such as guards for buildings during ancient times, but in the late twentieth century, surveillance became a central organizing social practice, affecting power dynamics, institutional practice, and interpersonal relations. Alongside changing technology, this transformation was driven by factors including increasing managerialism, greater public perception of risk, and political expediency. 

Some factors need to be taken in to account when considering an instance of social media surveillance. Who is carrying it out? A business dealing with customers, or profiling and marketing to potential customers? A community of individuals? What are the power relations between the surveillers and the surveilled? What kinds of data are being collected, and by what means? These might include narrative reports, audiovisual recordings, or activity traces, relating to public, personal, private, sensitive, or intimate situations. In this day in age, all of this now takes place via social media. The rapid development of computing technologies, and the social, political, and economic practices that have shaped and been shaped by this development, is one of the most significant enablers of social media surveillance. Regularly, whole sites or individual profiles are hacked, resulting in private information being released to the public. Recall the mass hacking of iCloud in 2015, in which a number of celebrities had their personal pictures stolen and uploaded to public sites. However, it is not just hackers that can get access to private information. Police investigators will use the law to allow them to collect information from a site, which would otherwise have been considered private information. This is information for everyone. College students need to pay extra attention to this. Your career might be saved.  

References 

Ball, K., Haggerty, K. D., & Lyon, D. (27 mar 2012). Surveillance as biopower. Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies. 

Humphreys, L. (2008). Who's Watching Whom? A Field study of Interactive Technology and Surveillance. Conference Papers -- International Communication Association, 1-26. Retrieved from Communication and Mass Media Complete database. 

Word count: 536