Privacy Bounded with Surveillance and Security - Essay Example

Privacy, Surveillance and Security by The of the The of the School The and where it is located The Date Privacy, Surveillance and Security It would not be an exaggeration to point out that the relationship between the government and the population features a considerable number of different aspects. One of them is surveillance that is performed by the former for the good of the latter. It has been stated that “Surveillance is as an ancient social process; however over perhaps the past 40 years it has emerged as the dominant organizing practice of late modernity” (Lyon, Haggerty and Ball 2012, p. 1). One should note that surveillance in different forms existed from the very dawn of civilization, when specially hired people collected information by listening to conversations, intercepting letters and watching people through small holes. It is quite obvious that nowadays the government has developed newer ways to perform surveillance. Indeed, at the present moment the population is being tracked with the help of different devices. For example, the all expression “to blend in with the crowd” has almost lost its meaning as it is possible to track the route of a particular person when one is using public transportation. Thus, the cards that people are using in the subway send data to the centre where this information is accumulated and all this allows other people to reconstruct a daily route of a person. In other words, the public transportation is no longer a means to travel secretly: it is being monitored by cameras and computers. In addition to that, driving a personal car also may not be considered to be a more private way of travelling. Thus, the development of technology contributed to the emergence of Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems which are able to identify the number plate of a car with great accuracy, regardless of the speed that the car is moving at (Lyon 2001, p. 18). Keeping in might that a lot of roads are equipped with this kind of systems, one should note that all this forms a widely spread framework when movement of a personal car is being closely monitored so a person can hardly go off the radar, so to speak. What is more important, the iconic devices of the modern world, namely smartphones, may also be monitored by the government. There is a legal framework that requires providers of communication services to record personal conversations and store them; moreover, the subject whose conversations are recorded may not be notified. (Bryant 2014, p. 183). Finally, the most popular platform for social interaction nowadays, namely the Internet, is being watched by the government too. For example, service provides are able to collect information about the web sites a person visited and one’s search inquires so that this data would later be handed to the government (Chesher & Kaura 1998, p. 328). Therefore, the behaviour in the virtual environment may also be monitored; so there is almost no area of social life that a person can truly called private. As one can clearly see, with the increase in the number of surveillance devices the privacy of a particular individual and the society in general is under threat. Having examined the major ways in which the government is able to perform surveillance, one can not help coming up with an inevitable conclusion: the notion of privacy as it was understood in the previous times no longer exists. Indeed, it would be an exaggeration to point out that the state spies on every its citizen round the clock, but one would make no mistake in that nowadays it is extremely easy to invade one’s privacy so that the subject would not even know it. In other words, the majority of people do not even realize that their privacy has been compromised. This holds important implications for the individuals in particular and the society in general. Speaking of the former, one might note that people may no long consider any communication that they do via the Internet or telephones to be private. While the recordings are not listened to in real time by a team of specialists, they are stored and might be accessed latter (Goold & Neyland 2008, p. 16). In addition to that, emails and messages in the social media also may not be considered to be private as they are delivered by a provider which is legally required to make a copy for the government. In addition to that, the technology of tracking personal search engine inquires and monitoring the content that one downloaded allows to draw a picture of the interests of a person. This holds an important implication for maintaining a private life of a person, as some people might be willing to keep their interests private, especially if they feature some kind of deviance (Nissenbaum 2009, p. 136). As a result, the modern people are deprived of the ability to search for the information that they are interested in privately. As for more general implications, it should be noted that the privacy of a person is also breached in terms of movement. As it has been stated before, both public transportation as well as personal car can be tracked down, which does not allow a person to move over long distances without notifying the government about it in one way or another (Stalder 2002, p. 123). This means that the idea of a getaway does not fully exist anymore as there will always be a party who knows the movement of a person. In addition to that, this completely ruins the privacy of a daily routing of a person. Indeed, in the course of a day, a person is being monitored by an incredible number of CCTV cameras, lots of other devices keep track of other information that is generated by an individual (Garfinkel 2000, p. 87). In other words, if one performs a careful analysis of this kind of data, personal life of a person will be viewed as a detailed timetable which makes the person extremely vulnerable. What is more important is that the above mentioned negative effect on privacy might also be observed on a bigger level as well. For example, one might suggest that the abundance of the surveillance devices has turned the society of a peculiar phenomenon to some kind of an ant hill that has been constructed under artificial conditions and is being watched closely by the observers (Rosenberg 1969, p. 30). In spite of the fact that the analogy might exaggerate some aspects of the situation that the society currently finds itself in, there is not mistake in the general atmosphere. Moreover, such state of affairs contributed to emergence of lack of balance within the society when some people are granted significantly bigger powers over others. Indeed, even though those who work in the agencies that perform surveillance are bound by the professional code of behaviour, the probability that they may use this information for purposes that bring negative consequences still exists (Rule 1973, p. 256). In addition to that, the information in question might even be stolen by criminals which will put lives of the people in great danger. Finally, one might conclude that with the fast use of surveillance devices ended the era of exclusive close societies and privacy in terms of social gathering. Thus, even though a group of people is able to close the doors and windows and have a private conversation behind them, they way they arrived to the place has already been caught by the cameras so the privacy of the gathering will be only ephemeral. In other words, the modern people are deprived of one of the aspects of social life that used to be among the driving forces of it (Sykes 1999, p. 22). However, one also might note that there are some rational counter arguments to the claims which were made before. For example, surveillance devices such as CCTV are deployed in public places; that it why it would be somewhat illogical to demand privacy from a place that is attended by numerous people (Deflem 2008, p. 13). In addition to that, if public places are to be made more private, there will not be a space for transparent social interaction. That is why one can hardly argue that surveillance devices take away privacy in situations when it does not exist a priori. In addition to that, when a person uses services of different providers such as Internet or telecommunication, one consciously agrees that the data that will be send will be processed by a third party (Murray 2010, p. 69). In other words, while concluding a contract a person acknowledges that fact that the communication that will be carried out via the above mentioned channels will not be private in the full meaning of the word. Finally, it would not be a mistake to point out that the scope of surveillance is usually being exaggerated as it primarily covers the most general instances of activity of a person in a social environment. In other words, there is still a plenty of ways to avoid surveillance in case this is what a person truly wants (Welsh & Farrington 2009, p. 105). As a result, one may suggest that the idea that surveillance has invaded privacy of the modern people does not really reflect all the aspects of the situation. References Bryant, R 2014, Policing digital crime, Ashgate Publishing, Farnham. Chesher, M & Kaura, R 1998, Electronic commerce and business communications, Springer, London. Deflem, M 2008, Surveillance and governance crime control and beyond, Emerald, Bingley. Garfinkel, S 2000, Database nation: The death of privacy, O’Reilly, California, USA. Goold B & Neyland D, New Directions in Surveillance and Privacy, Willan Publishing, Devon. Lyon D, Haggerty K & Ball K 2012, Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, Routledge, London. Lyon D 2001, Surveillance Society: Monitoring everyday life, Open University Press, Buckingham. Murray, A 2010, Information technology law: The law and society, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Nissenbaum H, 2009, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy and the Integrity of Social Life, Stanford University Press, California, USA. Norris C & Armstrong G 1999, The Maximum Surveillance Society – The Rise Of CCTV, Berg, Oxford. Rosenberg, J 1969, The Death of Privacy, Random House, New York, NY, USA. Rule, J 1973, Private lives, Public Surveillance, Allen Lane, London. Stalder, F 2002, ‘Privacy is not the antidote to surveillance’, Surveillance and Society 1(1): 120–24. Sykes, C 1999, The End of Privacy, St. Martin’s Press, New York, NY, USA. Welsh, B & Farrington, D 2009, Making public places safer: Surveillance and crime prevention, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Read More