Category: Canada

Facebook surveillance

Another great piece in the Ottawa Citizen´s Surveillance series, which is turning out to be probably the best newspaper coverage of the broad sweep of surveillance that I have yet seen.

This time they are talking to Dan Trottier and Val Steeves about the way that social networking technologies, and in particular Facebook, track individuals and groups.

The complete series The Surveillance Society: A Special Citizen Series, runs as follows:

31/01: The rise of the surveillance society

01/01: How surveillance categorizes us

02/02: Social networks and surveillance

03/02: Spying on each other

04/02: The promise and threat of behavioural targeting

05/02: Watching the watchers

Congratulations to reporter, Don Butler, in particular on some excellent work.

CCTV in Canada

News from Queen’s University’s Surveillance Project that the Surveillance Camera Awareness Network (SCAN), a stellar group of Canadian Surveillance Studies scholars, has released the first phase of its report on Camera Surveillance in Canada.

The report shows that public space CCTV is still relatively rare in Canada, with only 14 cities having implemented it. It argues that despite the lack of evidence for any effectiveness, and the absence of proper informed consent to schemes, the vast majority of the public support cameras largely on the basis of an ill-defined hope that they ‘work’.

My view is that the conditions for a British-style expansion would seem to be in place, were it not for the very different and much more activist role of Privacy Commissioners, informed by research like this, in questioning the need for CCTV. Let’s hope Britain’s role as an experimental surveillance guinea pig for the world will at least teach people elsewhere something…

The authors also mentioned that there is a surveillance series in the Ottawa Citizen that began Wednesday January 29. It features many surveillance studies academics from SCAN and more, and the first piece is really very good.

As another part of the series, the Citizen has adapted the 2016 scenarios that Kirstie Ball and I wrote for the Report on the Surveillance Society for the ICO back in 2006. They have pushed a load of things together so that it doesn’t quite makes sense, but never mind…