The “Information Age” in which we live has forced society to reconsider a lot of issues. Every day new definitions are being written, new lines drawn, and new rules made. We have had to re-examine critical concepts like privacy and ownership, because the Internet has scaled, shattered or otherwise laid siege to several centuries-old barriers. The book Ubiquitous Surveillance (edited by David Parry) contains a lot of interesting perspectives on the shifts in society during this age, with the issue of surveillance serving as the unifying theme of the chapters.

As the introduction points out, the increased ability and opportunity for surveillance (of many kinds, on many levels, by many parties) has fundamentally changed how we define life itself:

I would argue that life is now defined by the ability to produce data. The way one testifies to being alive, testifies to life, is through the production of data, from the very literal data produced by health monitoring (EKG meters, pulse, cholesterol level) to the constant stream of life data that is produced and shared online (disappearing from Facebook for a few days often elicits questions such as ‘Are you still alive?’). If something is not online it probably does not exist (‘Can you Google it?’). If you lack a data trail you might have a body, but you do not count as being alive (‘I am sorry; I can’t help you. I don’t have a record of you in our system’).

This surveillance is almost inescapable. In this sense, I would liken society to a kitten that has climbed a very high tree for the fun of it. Having reached the top, we look down and panic. We can see now how precarious our perch really is, but we cannot figure out how to get down. That is, having arguably “conquered” this new online world, we have found out that it has a dark side. People have begun to realize, slowly but surely, how much of their privacy has been lost. Worse yet, we can see that it was not simply stolen; in many cases, we unwittingly gave it away.

At the center of this new surveillance society lies Google (discussed in this chapterby Omar Tene). The Google search engine is an incomparably useful tool, but it comes at a price. Just think about the last fifty queries you’ve types into Google. Would you want those posted on your Facebook wall or emailed to all your contacts? Of course, when you type things into Google, you assume your search history will be kept private. You might not be googling anything as incriminating as “neck breaking” or “how to make chloroform,” but you’ve probably asked Google a few embarrassing questions. As Tene points out, you also use Google to “explore job opportunities, financial investments, consumer goods, sexual interests, travel plans, friends and acquaintances, matchmaking services, political issues, religious beliefs, medical  conditions, and more” (pg 1442).

And of course Google knows more about you than your search history. If you have a Gmail account, Google also has access to your contact list and emails–perhaps your schedule (Google Calendar) and even your documents (Google Docs). Add that to your Youtube and Blogger account. You see? Hard to believe that one company could know so much about you. And of course, it isn’t just one company that knows all this. Other companies monitor your activity, too. Although their motives might be benign (nothing worse than tailoring ads to attract your attention), the amount of information they have access too is eerie.

With all the recent news stories about servers being hacked and customer information being stolen, it’s hard not to worry about the future of your privacy. A hundred years ago, identity theft would probably have sounded absurd. Now it’s an all-too-real possibility. As technology gets “smarter,” so do thieves.  You used to have to worry about the big guy down the street with the criminal record; now you have to worry about the nerd next door. We used to be afraid of thieves with guns and knives; now we have to worry about thieves with pocket-sized scanners that can harvest your credit card information through your wallet, pocket or purse. It’s a scary world.

* photo can be found here