A Harris online poll of 2416 adult US citizens, conducted between May 28th and June 1st, 2009, has found a 96% rate of support for federal government video surveillance in ‘specific public places’, according to Reuters.
Further statistics from the survey include an 80% rate of support for ‘any available measures’ to protect citizens in a terrorist attack, and 54% supporting the US of federal stimulus funding for video surveillance. As the press release notes, public support appears to be totally detached from the evidence we have about the limited effectiveness of video surveillance – something is (quite literally) being seen to be done, and this is what appears to matter. Video surveillance is culturally engrained, even expected, as a result of two decades of movies and TV shows which use surveillance as a theme (from programs like Cops to ‘realityTV’). So in many ways such a result is not altogether surprising.
The poll appears to have been commissioned as part of a PR campaign by an advanced ‘intelligent video surveillance’ company, which has a clearly stated commercial interest, which makes one wonder exactly how the questions were phrased, and how they were asked. The word ‘terrorism’ is mentioned a lot, and I expect there would be a great deal of difference in responses to a similar question that did not mention terrorism (or indeed did not mention the supposed purpose at all), and indeed a survey of people who had read a summary of available research on CCTV would probably once again, result in a different percentage (as economic experiments with ‘willingness to pay’ methods of valuing policy decisions have shown, informed participants make different judgements). I will try to get hold of the raw figures to take a deeper look…
According to a new market-research report produced by Arizona firm, In-Stat, the market for video surveillance equipment has seen a slow-down in unit grow in 2009, and even a decline in overall revenue (and this may be the first time this has happened for many years). This is interesting as it is conventional wisdom that the security sector is generally unaffected or even benefits from recession (but see some previous posts here and here for other aspects of surveillance in a global recession). However the report also states that whereas sales of cameras are relatively flat, sales of data-recording equipment, especially hybrid recorders that can handle both analogue and digital images, are increasing and this is partly due to the US government’s stimulus package. This suggests that those operating exisiting video surveillance systems that may have older analogue cameras are chosing not to upgrade their cameras now but are making sure that they can retain the images more efficiently. The report predicts that, after the recovery, the overall market for video surveillance equipment in 2011 will be $19Bn US.
Mind you, I haven’t read the report in full, only this summary, because it retails at $3,495 US! Someone is clearly expecting to make plenty of money out of the recession…
Wired online has a report that the US Central Intelligence Agency has bought a significant stake in a market research firm called Visible Technologies that specializes in monitoring new social media such as blogs, mirco-blogs, forums, customer feedback sites and social networking sites (although not closed sites like Facebook – or at least that’s what they claim). This is interesting but it isn’t surprising – most of what intelligence agencies has always been sifting through the masses of openly available information out there – what is now called open-source intelligence – but the fact is that people are putting more of themselves out their than ever before, and material that you would never have expected to be of interest to either commercial or state organisations is now there to be mined for useful data.
The US House of Representatives will finally get to debate whether online advertising which tracks the browsing habits of users is a violation of privacy and needs to be controlled. A bill introduced by Rep. Rick Boucher of Virginia will be propsing an opt-out regime that gives users information about the uses to which their data will be put, and allows them to refuse to be enroled. At present many such services work entirely unannounced, placing cookies on users’ hard drives and using other tracking and datamining techniques, and without any way in which a user can say ‘no’. Of course, we have yet to see the results of the inveitable industry scare-stories and hard-lobbying on the what will be proposed, let alone pased. But the proposal itself is particularly significant because so far the US has so far always bowed to business interests on online privacy and data protection, and if this bill is pased, it is a sign that what EFF-founder, Howard Rhiengold, long ago called the ‘electronic frontier’ might start to acquire a little more law and order in favour of ordinary people.
Brandscaping is a term used in marketing to describe the metaphorical landscape of brands (either for a particular brand, company or sector), however it is also being used by some researchers, including me, to describe the way in which brands are being infiltrated into urban landscapes, with the ultimate aim of being ‘inhabitable’ perhaps even 24/7 (see for example Disney’s move into urban development with Celebration in Florida).
Contemporary brandscaping makes use of new ambient intelligence, pervasive or ubiquitous computing technologies (‘ubicomp’) and ubiquitous wireless communications to create a landscape in which the consumer is targeted with specific messages directing them to certain consumption patterns. Such communication cans of course be two-way and provide corporations with valuable and very personal data on consumption patterns. As I’ve argued in many presentations over the last few years, ubicomp is necessarily also ubiquitous surveillance (what I call ‘ubisurv’ – hence the name of this blog!) because to work it requires locatability and addressability. Japan, and Tokyo in particular, has been the site for a number of cutting edge experiments in this regard, including the ‘Tokyo Ubiquitous Technology Project’ which embedded 1000 RFID tags which can communicate with RFID-enabled keitai (mobile phones) in upscale Ginza as well as several other pilot schemes around Ueno Park and Shinjuku.
TUTP is not all about marketing surveillance however, part of the scheme has involved ‘Universal Design’ (UD) principles, with one experiment to embed chips in the yellow tactile tiles designed to help guide sight- and mobility-impaired people around the city so that useful access information could be passed through specially-enabled walking sticks. I’m very interested in such experiments as they indicate an alternative direction for ubicomp environments which are about genuinely enabling people who are currently disabled by social and architectural norms, and creating a richer sensory landscape. They show that both surveillance and ‘scary’ technology like RFID chips can be humanised.
Unfortunately in our consumer-capitalist world (and Tokyo is the exemplary city of hyper-consumption), marketing and building brandscapes tends to take priority over enabling the excluded and the disadvantaged. But there are different ways of doing this too, which can be more or less intrusive and consensual. The other day I was talking about the growth in functionality of the Suica smart travel card system. Suica-enabled keitai can now, be used buying all sorts of things and since 2006 there have been a growing number of ‘SuiPo’ (short for ‘Suica Poster’) sites, Suica-enabled advertising hoardings that will, on demand send information to your mobile e-mail address with on particular advertising in which you are interested if you pass your Suica card or phone over a scanner placed next to the poster (see photos below)
The difference between SuiPo and the Ginza RFID scheme however is that it with SuiPo is that it is the consumer who makes the choice whether to activate any particular poster’s additional information system. In this sense it is a development of the i-Mode system in which many keitai can read information from special barcodes embdedded in magazine advertisements. It doesn’t automatically call your phone every time you pass an enabled poster, once you have signed up. Not as high-tech but slightly more consensual. However this will, of course, lead to the accumulation of a lot of data on consumption interests. This potentially generates a massive consumer surveillance tool, because it can be linked up travel patterns (your registered Suica card sends information back on where you go – I was wrong about the absolute differences between London’s Oyster and Tokyo’s Suica systems the other day) and information about consumption.
So will this potential become reality? The page on privacy and data protection on the SuiPo website (as usual the link is hidden away at the bottom of the front page!), is pretty standard stuff except for the legitimate purposes for which the data can be used once you sign up. They are, for those who don’t read Japanese, for:
Sending the specific requested information to you;
Improving services;
Data processing and analysis;
JR East’s promotional marketing; and
JR East customer questionnaires.
Purposes 2 and 3 pretty much allow JR to do anything it likes with the data once you have signed up, and there is no statement as to what can or cannot be done with data once it has been ‘mined’ – analysed and transformed into more useful to the company or other organisations (corporate or state) which might want to buy or access such knowledge. ‘Ubisurv’ indeed…
UK satirical magazine, Private Eye, this week brings the ludicrous Stop Phoul Play website to my attention. This is a corporate spin site devoted entirely to defending BT’s underhand and intrusive ‘Phorm’ online advertising technology against what it calls ‘privacy pirates’ who they claim are either being paid or pushed to damage BT.
Those listed as ‘piracy pirates’ include the excellent investigative IT journal, The Register, the Open Rights Group and the brilliant Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR), along with numerous bloggers and contributors to web forums. Now, it may be that some other corporations with rival technologies would like Phorm to fail, just as Microsoft probably enjoys it a great deal every time Google takes a PR hit (or vice-versa), but to suggest that everyone who make a criticism of Phorm is secretly part of some conspiracy against BT is frankly, either stupid paranoid.
And there are very good reasons for being critical of Phorm in the trojan-like manner of its operation and the way in which it has been tested without the consent of users. As Private Eye also reminds us, Phorm has landed the UK government in legal trouble with the EU. It hardly needs a conspiracy to make people justifiably annoyed.
This is one of the weirder exercises in PR I have seen, not least because its paranoia and promotion of conspiracies can only be damaging to BT. Thus it is no surprise to find that, according to the The Register, that it is the product of the fevered imagination of Patrick Robertson, whose previous clients include the lovely General Pinochet and former Tory MP and convicted liar, Jonathan Aitkin. So go take a look at Stop Phoul Play (while it still exists…) – it really is quite insane.
the primary limitation to any social networking tool being used for purposes that users don´t like is that the users can just walk
There´s been some discussion recently over surveillance on Facebook and in particular, the question of whether Facebook is planning to make the vast amounts of data it has for more targeted and intrusive marketing. Britain´s Daily Telegraph reported yesterday, based on an interview with Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s global markets director (and not coincidentally, sister of founder Mark Zuckerberg), that it was going to do this. It based its conclusion on the fact that Facebook was demonstrating new instant polling tools at the Davos World Economic Forum, Facebook´s development of so-called User Engagement Advertising, and the fact that unnamed ´marketing experts´ say that Facebook could be ´worth millions´to advertisers.
But, it turns out this is putting 2+2 together to make 5. Techcrunch was one of many tech blogs that questioned the Daily Telgraph´s story. They asked Facebook what was going on and were told that the WEF polls were nothing to do with Engagement Ads (which have been on Facebook for a while already) and that ´Facebook has, for many years, allowed the targeting of advertising in a non-personally identifiable way, based on profile attributes. Nothing has changed in our approach, and Facebook is committed, as always, to connecting users in a trusted environment.´
Now I don´t trust The Daily Telegraph, which has been declining in quality over the last few years and cutting experienced journalists in favour of using agency stories rewritten by trainees. But equally I don´t trust Facebook (or for that matter, any company run by rich kids whose only experience of the world is college, but that´s another story…). It is easy to imagine that they encourage such stories to test the waters. If the reaction was less worried, they might indeed decide to reveal themselves as a massive marketing scam, but the primary limitation to any social networking tool being used for purposes that users don´t like is that the users can just walk. Facebook appeared from nowhere to become a global player within a few years and it could disappear just as quickly when the next big thing arrives. The rise and fall of net-based companies is only going to get faster.
(Thanks to Sami Coll and Jason Nolan for bringing this to my attention)
ubisurv 