Surveillance can defined as the process of monitoring the behavior of people or processes within organized systems. This is to ensure people conform to the expected or desired norms for security or social control. The Panopticon or the “All Seeing Eye” was a famous form of surveillance designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of this design was to allow the guard to watch over the prisoners while the prisoners were not able to know whether they were being watched or not. This omnipresent sense of constantly being watched caused the prisoners to internalize that process of control exerted by the guards and thereby motivating them to behave themselves.
What does my topic of Facebook have to do with surveillance? Oh you’d be surprised. The day I realized that I should be careful of what I post on Facebook and the people I allow to be my friends went something like this…
Wakes up extremely hung over from partying all night looks at the clock and firmly resolves that 9:15 is a far too un-godly hour to have to be at work. Calls manager claiming to have eaten something bad the night before and couldn’t make it in to work.
Me being naïve had added my manager as a “Facebook friend” when the friend request came up. Little did I know that it would be her way of keeping an eye on her employees.
Next day at work…
Manager: Hey Nicole Feeling Better?
Me: Much thank you.
Manager: You had quite the night on Friday didn’t you?
Me: What do you mean? (Feigns innocence of course)
Manager: Those were quite the pictures of you partying with your friends. Who was that boy you were sitting on? He doesn’t look like your boyfriend.
Oh snap.
This is the moment I realized how valuable privacy blocks could be, and how easily people could monitor your behavior over things like Facebook. We put pictures up of ourselves doing amazingly stupid and potentially illegal things – how many of you readers can say that they have pictures of yourself drinking in public and completely smashed with friends, or even smoking a hookah? The last one still amazes me considering the consumption of illegal drugs is well, illegal, yet we post it on Facebook for the world to see.
During my high school years, some teachers even went as far as to suspend some students on the basis of finding drunken photos of teeny boppers or “I hate (insert teacher’s name here)” groups. I also read an article that workplaces and schools screen potential applicants via Facebook to see what kind of potential employees/students they would be.
What we expect to be private domains that only our friends can see and laugh at, is really an open arena for the world to gape into from all sides. So next time you want to post those “hilarious frat party photos”, stop and think about who just might be watching you.
2 comments:
I definitely agree with you that the concept of surveillance in society today is a rather frightening thought, as every aspect of our lives is being videotaped or tracked through some from of technology or another. In terms of Facebook, I am more concerned over the surveillance that Facebook has over its members, rather than say your boss viewing some photos of you and uncovering a lie. If you happened to be one of the very few people who actually took the time to read the lengthy nine-point font print that covered privacy, you would realize how much control and surveillance Facebook has and uses.
Facebook starts collecting information from the time that you register for the site, starting with your name, age (day, month, year), gender, e-mail address and password, which is then followed by information that is not required such as: where you go to school, where you work, your phone number, your address, hobbies…etc. Next, they collect your IP address and browser types, so they can store information in your browser using cookies. These cookies store everything from your information to your login ID. Not only are they able to get to the information on your Facebook page they also “may collect information on you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service.” Which is extremely worrisome that they may actually go research information about you.
If collecting information on you wasn’t enough, they also work with third parties and may disclose information about you to third parties, however they may not state who you are. However, by allowing third parties to deliver advertisements directly to users, third parties are able to download cookies onto your computer, which Facebook has no control over. These cookies record information from your computer such as what ads you have clicked on.
Facebook also owns anything and everything that is on the site at any given time, meaning that they may go ahead and profit off of the pictures of you and your friends by selling them to advertising companies. This has to take quite a bit of surveillance to skim through photos to find one that may be suitable for an ad, even if you have your page “blocked” to anyone who is not on your friends list.
However, as anyone who has Facebook knows a vast amount of time spent on Facebook is purely for surveillance measures: checking on who is dating whom, who is doing what, traveling where… etc. So as much as we would like to get mad at those who are using surveillance for their own purposes, we have to take a look at ourselves, as we are one of them.
Ah! Facebook privacy policies (Or lack thereof)! You’re right that is very upsetting. It’s hard to believe that people are unknowingly/ignorantly signing their rights away. So theoretically, if an advertising campaign were to find a picture of you with your friends and they really liked it, they could just take it and post it on a bill board, and you’d have no legal rights over it? No money for being in the picture, or even a say in having it posted for the world to see? That seems really wrong. No wonder Facebook can stay open for free. Here we are thinking that we are so fortunate to have Facebook as a free social networking site that we can use to keep in touch with friends, when in reality, Facebook is actually freeloading off of us users. Not just the other way around! I think a good term for this kind of freeloading is symbiosis – a relationship between two people (aka Facebook and its users) in which each person is dependent upon and receives reinforcement, whether beneficial or detrimental, from the other. Which is doing more harm? Facebook who is leaching information out of us, or the general public who is leaching information out of their “friends”? Would either be able to continue on with their way of life without the other?
I suppose with that kind of surveillance available (even with all applications privacy blocked) it wouldn’t be very hard to track a person. Since many people use the same passwords for many of their different activities such as Facebook, e-mails, online banking, or even their PIN numbers, theoretically couldn’t Facebook be used as a prime location for identity theft? Skilled hackers could probably get this information that we are basically giving away (passwords and such) and completely ruin our financial identity. Perhaps this is something we should take into more serious consideration. The public should be warned about the dangers of revealing too much private information because like I stated in my original post, we never really do know who just might be watching us.
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