The wonderful world of data protection – an academic odyssey

First of all, let me make one thing perfectly clear: I’m pro data protection. Point blank. Data protection is an important aspect of privacy, and I consider privacy to be one of the most important values of contemporary societies. Hell, I have even pointed out the detrimental potential of data collection, transfer, and processing in several articles on discrimination and trusted traveler programs. But right now, data protection is driving me nuts. How come? We might call this a chain of unfortunate circumstances, but data protection has successfully blocked my research for a couple months now. 

RGS 2014 - a surveillance recap

It’s been a while since the last conference recap – so here we go again! Surveillance studies has been a multi-disciplinary field from the outset, and particularly geographers have investigated the production and transformation of space through techniques of surveillance and control.

CPDP14 - a surveillance recap

After the recent flurry of Calls, here's another conference recap with relevance to STS and surveillance studies. This year's edition of CPDP, which took place in Brussels last week, was indeed heavily coined by the “Snowden revelations” and the ensuing international political debates on PRISM, Upstream, and whatnot. Thus, while CPDP13 had its main scope on the (still ongoing) reform of the European data protection framework, this year it was all about the relationship between privacy (and data protection) and security and surveillance. Highly intriguing! [oh, and just to respond to an emerging theme of the STSS repository: there was pleasantly little explicit talk of “Big Data” - however it was of course always implicitly present as the specter that haunts contemporary discourses on privacy and data protection :)]

Conference Recap: Police Symposium on New Technologies

After the recent wave of calls for highly interesting events, it's about time for some original stuff! So here's a brief recap of a conference I attended last week - and this one was in fact quite different from the regular academic experience, which makes it all the more interesting. The federal law enforcement agencies of Germany, Switzerland and Austria, as well as the "Landespolizei" of Bavaria organized a tri-national conference on "new technologies" which was held in the VIP lounge of the Berne hockey stadium. This year was in fact the 4th edition of the event, setting the scope on ubiquitous computing (find the agenda here). But of course it was all about Big Data - surprise!

Colonial Surveillance

Elia Zureik recently published an article on colonial surveillance (in the Oct/Nov 2013 issue of Red Pepper). Census-taking, finger printing and other forms of colonial oversight, he argues, were a crucial part of constituting and ruling over colonial populations. Not only are these surveillance practices relevant for the colonised word, they also 'spilled over' to the colonising countries. Zureik illustrates this with historical cases (Alfred McCoy's research about the relation between the US and the Philippines), and with contemporary practices (the use of drones by Israel).

My day as a data dealer

A while back I stumbled upon a browser game which in some ways could be considered an attempt to gamify privacy literacy. Gamification in the context of surveillance usually means the exploitation of the pleasures of play in order to collect and sell data, i.e. in fitness or productivity apps. In a somewhat similar vein, a group of web developers/hacktivists based in Vienna, Austria, set out to make education about privacy issues more interesting and pleasurable (but I suspect they don’t want to sell the players’ data). The media reactions made me curious, so I spent one Sunday afternoon trying to experience the dark pleasures of big data.

4S Annual Meeting - a "surveillance review"

It's been a couple weeks now since the 2013 edition of the 4S Annual Meeting took place in San Diego. Time for a quick guest author's review! The event has been the largest conference organized by the Society for Social Studies of Science so far, assembling over 1.200 attendees in the "Town and Country Resort and Convention Center", and providing the convenient possibility to relax by the pool under palm trees between the sessions.

4S recap

We've been back from 4S for a while now and I think it's time for a little recap of some of the surveillance relevant sessions -- and there were quite a few! Let's say, big data was really BIG this time; it was present even in sessions which didn't have the magic words in the title. It was pretty amazing. Matthias will guest blog about the surveillance panels (yay!), and I'll try to talk a little about the algorithms stuff (which also was about big data) (man, big data! it's everywhere!).

Project: Zooming in

My current obsession is with ‘zooming in’: A and B below portray the same object (crime rates in a city), yet they look very different and lead to very different conclusions. How is zooming in accomplished in practice? What bodies of knowledges, skills and tools need to be drawn together to attain a close view? How can we describe it as a normative move?

I study a case of data mining in  Dutch crime policy to understand this. (The map below is fictional.)