The first part of this lecutre concerned surveillance and sousveillance, with sousveillance being the practice of surveillance from within, i.e. a protester filming news reporters filming the protest. This exposes and subverts the traditional idea of people being powerless against surveillance – we are watched and there is nothing we can do about it – which i find to be wuite a liberating idea. I think that today there really is no such thing as privacy, you can never be fully aware of how many ways in which you are being monitered every day (and its probably a LOT more than you think!) This made me think of the ‘talking’ CCTV cameras that they have in the town centre of my hometown, Northampton, which tell you off for anti social behaviours i.e. littering – i personally found this just a little bit unnerving to know that i am constantly being watched in this area, and will even be ‘told off’ if i do something considered ‘antisocial’.
Here is a BBC news link about ‘talking CCTV’ – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/6524495.stm
This leads on nicely to Facebook, favourite of students, teens, networking adults, businesses, societies, and pretty much everyone at the moment it seems! I had always naively wondered how networking sites like Facebook (and particularly Myspace) have those adverts and links that coincidently are about MY interests – wow how did they do that? Then i realised the simple fact that i had willingly posted a wealth of information on their sites, and as you don’t pay for sites like Facebook, they have to make money somewhere – advertising. Now this i’m ok with, as its my fault for putting my information there, and i do so at my own risk (as stated on Facebook’s Privacy Policy) http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/policy.php?ref=pf.
What i found more worrying was the fact that through adding 3rd party applications on Facebook, they can not only access and STORE (for as long as they like) your personal information, pictures etc, but also the information of your friends who have not even added the application – scary! I rarely add applications on Facebook, mainly because i don’t want to be tempted to spend any more time on there than i already do, but i always get countless ‘requests’ to add applications off friends, so im guessing my inforamtion could be anywhere on the internet, which is a daunting thought! In a world where we are increasingly surveilled though, it seems like we have to accept these things.
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