Shared Sight and the Cyclops (pdf available here)

Dana Cuff, Mark Hansen & Jerry Kang

UCLA

Privacy, Visibility, and Exposure

Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown University Law Center

In Defense of Public Places

Deirdre Mulligan

Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic ~ UC Berkeley

Lauren Gelman, Commentator

Stanford Law School

__Cuff, Hansen and Kang__: Shared sight and the Cyclops

Sight- a complicated concept. Augmented sight..

Vision is affective and emotional. Has an impact. But all vision requires computation, is computationally augmented.

Visual privacy is not different from information privacy

Interesting events have to be distinguished from uninteresting events

Collection can be the sorting, and presentation is what makes it comprehensible to humans

Gerry:

1. What center for metanetwork sensing can do: ‘seeing the forest’
1. instrument/embed a forest with sensors. (video projection of information gathered) Temperature, humidity sensors, acoustic towers, robots can trundle through streams. James Reserve use context to give us sight that could not see before
2. Seeing the city. When sensing goes urban?
1. Scientists have no property rights, capital, publicity, PR to instrument the urban environment
2. Vectors of entry: cellphones, RFID, pollutant sensors, cameras.
1. Decentralization of the way info is collected and distributed “beyond scientists”
2. Beyond science, more towards, art politics policy advocacy, citizen science
3. Shared Sight
1. Don’t fear amateurs/citizens/hacks – get excited! Can it produce a form of shared sight --Blog data upload to a data commons. Others
1. Distributed sense making
2. Value of visual publicity
3. Not longer only surveillance
2. Incentives to data commons
1. Are IP rights correct?
2. Privacy
3. Liability (section 230 immunity) – antislapp works to protect datacommons
4. Knowledge can be dangerous
1. More information is not good info, lead to poor policies
2. Self fulfilling prophecies
3. Cyclops. Given the power to see the future, but only his death
1. Unavoidable tragedy
2. Does knowledge mean action?
3. Veil of ignorance

Dana

Architecture is encumbered by social conditions and social structures.

How does space, in artists’ work, take advantage of these shared sensing capabilities.

The dialogue about privacy doesn’t always mean tradeoff with shared data.

D-tower a website tied to a public sculpture. It’s a giant mood ring for the city!

Community responsive effects of data commons

Maejin Yoon – at Olympics in Athens. Wired fiberoptic spaces. Whitenoise white light. Marking people’s paths through public space.

--What is the public sphere?

Not Habermas’ café source of political debate

Is it about consumption or citizenship? She says more about consumption

Fade to black – data for political and advocacy purposes. Upward cameras that collect pollutants in different cities.

Artist designs “Feral robot dogs.” they sense pollutants in the environment. She trains kids to program the dogs. Kids explain to the news reporters what it is the dogs have found as they sniff out pollutants in their own neighborhoods and schools. (AWESOME)

Google Mashup – auto burglaries mapped on neighborhood– corroborate information like this

(The point at which it becomes politically useful is when its open-ness becomes a risk)

NKLA – maps that have neighborhood relevant data, photographs of prostitution, – repercussions for the prostitute as well as for the client,

John. Stats guy

People contribute data and structures that allow people to contribute data

How might a data commons be used by the public instead of scientists?

Current models are not sticking to database structures

Data discovery

– opentopia – google search for keywords to indicate images from webcams, can have chats around it and comment

– encourage people to share data, encourage discussions, and discovery

“data mirages” “distributed sense making”

inevitable effect of shared neighborhood data is quarrel, how to make inferences

(Placeblogger)

Campaign Mechanics

UCLA (FIND project. future internet designs) designing core network services to share data. Network knows when and where a data is published. Request resolution of location and time to a specified level of specificity (not my IP address, only my time zone, etc).

__Julie Cohen__

Privacy, Visibility and disclosure: her work comes from information privacy more than visual surveillance

Incommensurability of visual and information privacy debate – where is it?

1. the way we think about privacy is dependent on the paradigm of visibility (legally framed) – linguistically entrenched. Seeing= understanding. Blindness =not getting it. Infoprivacy argument: paradigm of seeing is a distraction in discussion of what is problematic about visual surveillance. Prevents us from seeing systematic harm of transparency (ubiquitous). Hard to get that when you are focused on visibility.
1. Panopticon metaphor is an accident of history. At the time that Bentham coined the term, transparency had to do with seeing in the first place. But Foucault’s metaphor went beyond visible observation
1. Normalization – systematize and sort and classify people, need info to do that. Info privacy is a component. Visual surveillance is not critical

1. but the experience people have the experience of people have of visual surveillance. Doesn’t get at this disconnect between law’s lack of recognition. Here focusing on visual is really important. Limitation of legal definition of privacy rights
1. all vision is information processing, computationally augmented
2. privacy invasion is informational harm
1. even harm in privacy defined as spatial. We’re talking about accessibility of information

Surveillance alters the experience of space

Surveillance produces EXPOSURE – a condition of exposures, makes __s different

1. inculcates passivity, tractability
1. Hille Koskela – space as a container full of passive bodies,
2. It’s a rearrangement of space that makes people exposed
3. Don’t have to know much about them in order for the surveillance to containerize space
2. Constrains the active process of place-making. The capacity of the space to serve as context in which identity/community is developed and performed.
1. Place – is an active and relational and evolving construct, surveillance changes the parameters
2. (HK- emotional space): changes the affect and intellect and relations in space.
3. This too is broader than visual privacy. Experienced space is not only visual, part of our space is over communication networks. Network space interact the world
4. Missed a spot
3. How should we think about resistance, sousveillance, shared sight etc?
1. Are they are only through sight and seeing?
2. Or access to information and how has it been collected?
3. The structure of experienced space?
1. If practices are directed at transparency issues and not space issues that limits their effectiveness

In order to talk about this you need a theory of the subject. Foucault won’t help us. Liberalism gives us a subject that we may not find useful (independent individual possessing rights) – which she thinks is unsatisfactory.

__Deirdre Mulligan__

Engage public and policy makers while they wire our public spaces

Limits to individual privacy focus. We have limited leverage.

The individual focus is not successful

Legislature has been supportive of privacy when it is an instrumental interest in other rights we value.

Privacy in Public concept is hard to frame.

First Amendent has 2 strands

Supposed to protect individual autonomy

Right to speak because we want everyone to be informed before they vote – deliberative democracy, environment to exchange

Privacy referring to a social state of affairs. Structure relations between the individual and the state.

What’s happening to the public forum

DHS 2004 193million dollars on cameras

No rationalization for these. If DHS was building them themselves they would required to undergo a PIA. But it’s subcontracted so there’s no restriction.

Nobody has evidence about whether they work, and they don’t want to research it

What’s the value of the public place

Many disciplines recognize the value of public places. People often think of them as specific non fungible places

Social science - space as socially constructed, some speak of themselves

Visual surveillance altering space

• Makes physical boundaries of the space indeterminate
• Actors (watchers) invisible – no mutuality
• Temporal boundaries eroded (permanent)
• Discrete events to a composite picture (produces something that isn’t there)

In practice?

The Urban Eye Project and other projects

Many things, she highlights 2

The invisibility of state action

Reporters sitting in CCTV control room watching

Undermining “density and intensity” central to civility rules, dense and intense interactions shape the concept of civility. Both kinds of ‘veillance stretch the interactions all out of shape

Surveillance doesn’t lead to normalization

Leads to preemptive exclusion – remove the poor people from public spaces.

Malls as private places legally allowed to kick certain people out

other data – prevent people’s ability to enter space

wiring is an architectural component of public space.

The importance of norms is citizen-citizen interaction. (the end of privacy) Doesn’t prevent us from a tort action. The technology makes it difficult to enforce social norms and engage in self-help.

The importance of the Constitution on citizen-state interaction: what normatively is the right amount of surveillance to maintain things in terms of deliberative democracy and other values of public spaces. Courts won’t help us.

__Lauren Gelman Comment:__

Working on an election guide for bloggers. Everyone wants to know if they can photograph or videotape the vote. Plan to use it protectively, commemoratively. But it could be intimidating, inhibiting.

Video surveillance: “I don’t get why people think that since I walk down the street and can be seen, it’s the same as a camera captures me”

Informational privacy

Control of information

How we are in the places we are

How can we interact in these surevilled spaces?

Video is a data-point plus. Being watched transforms us personally. That is in itself separate from

Commons – how you govern a pre-existing resource. What does it mean to create one from scratch. Not the same as moving from one governance structure to another one. We don’t have this data yet, and it needs to be differentiated. The differentiation should especially take account of

Should it be propertized?

Should it be privacy-protected?

E-Z- Pass is already out there.

Questions: Dignity and Respect. Privacy and publicity. The act of viewing can among other things, confer dignity on what your’re viewing (which is maybe one reason why some ppl feel uncomfortable watching the Juba video).. like the Quaker concept of bearing witness… or it can objectify (which might be a reason some feel uncomfortable watching jennicam, but also what both rabid islamophobes AND –philes might feel w/r/t Juba

We’ve talked about how people being watched claim two different effects. But with respect to the act of watching the dignifying aspect of watching hasn’t been discussed so much. Is that what Tunick was up to? Is it all limited the way his seems to have been?