Everyday Surveillance

When we think of surveillance in our society, we usually imagine “Big Brother” scenarios with the government tracking our every move. The actual surveillance of our everyday lives is much more subtle, however, and may be more insidious. William G. Staples shows how our lives are tracked by both public and private organizations—sometimes with our consent, and sometimes without—through our internet use, cell phones, public video cameras, credit cards, license plates, shopping habits, and more. Everyday Surveillance is a provocative exploration of the myriad ways we are watched each day, and how this surveillance shapes our lives. Thoroughly revised, the second edition considers new topics, such as the rise of social media, and updates research throughout. Everyday Surveillance introduces students to concepts of social control and incites classroom discussion about how surveillance impacts the ways we understand people and our lives at home, work, school, or in the community.

In what ways does contemporary surveillance reinforce social divisions? How are police and consumer surveillance becoming more similar as they are automated? Are we forced to choose between classical and poststructuralist approaches in explaining surveillance? Why is surveillance both expanding globally and focusing more on the human body? Surveillance Society takes a post-privacy approach to surveillance with a fresh look at the relations between technology and society. Personal data is collected from us all the time, whether we know it or not, through identity numbers, camera images, or increasingly by other means such as fingerprint and retinal scans. This book examines the constant computer-based scrutiny of ordinary daily life for citizens and consumers as they participate in contemporary societies. It argues that to understand what is happening we have to go beyond Orwellian alarms and cries for more privacy to see how such surveillance also reinforces divisions by sorting people into social categories. The issues spill over narrow policy and legal boundaries to generate responses at several levels including local consumer groups, internet activism, and international social movements. In this fascinating study, sociologies of new technology and social theories of surveillance are illustrated with examples from North America, Europe, and Pacific Asia. David Lyon provides an invaluable text for undergraduate and postgraduate sociology courses both in social theory and in science, technology and society. It will also appeal much more widely, for example to those with an interest in politics, social control, human geography and public administration.

Technologies of Insecurity examines how general social and political concerns about terrorism, crime, migration and globalization are translated into concrete practices of securitisation of everyday life. Who are we afraid of in a globalizing world? How are issues of safety and security constructed and addressed by various local actors and embodied in a variety of surveillance systems? Examining how various forms of contemporary insecurity are translated into, and reduced to, issues of surveillance and social control, this book explores a variety of practical and cultural aspects of technological control, as well as the discourses about safety and security surrounding them. (In)security is a politically and socially constructed phenomenon, with a variety of meanings and modalities. And, exploring the inherent duality and dialectics between our striving for security and the simultaneous production of insecurity, Technologies of Insecurity considers how mundane objects and activities are becoming bearers of risks which need to be neutralised. As ordinary arenas - such as the workplace, the city centre, the football stadium, the airport, and the internet - are imbued with various notions of risk and danger and subject to changing public attitudes and sensibilities, the critical deconstruction of the nexus between everyday surveillance and (in)security pursued here provides important new insights about how broader political issues are translated into concrete and local practices of social control and exclusion.

From 9/11 to the Snowden leaks, stories about surveillance increasingly dominate the headlines. But surveillance is not only 'done to us' – it is something we do in everyday life. We submit to surveillance, believing we have nothing to hide. Or we try to protect our privacy or negotiate the terms under which others have access to our data. At the same time, we participate in surveillance in order to supervise children, monitor other road users, and safeguard our property. Social media allow us to keep tabs on others, as well as on ourselves. This is the culture of surveillance. This important book explores the imaginaries and practices of everyday surveillance. Its main focus is not high-tech, organized surveillance operations but our varied, mundane experiences of surveillance that range from the casual and careless to the focused and intentional. It insists that it is time to stop using Orwellian metaphors and find ones suited to twenty-first-century surveillance — from 'The Circle' or 'Black Mirror.' Surveillance culture, David Lyon argues, is not detached from the surveillance state, society and economy. It is informed by them. He reveals how the culture of surveillance may help to domesticate and naturalize surveillance of unwelcome kinds, and considers which kinds of surveillance might be fostered for the common good and human flourishing.

Drawing on original empirical research from Singapore and Hong Kong, Gendered Labour, Everyday Security and Migration interrogates women migrant domestic workers’ experiences of work and workplace exploitation. It examines the ways in which these women negotiate everyday security and safe work against the backdrop of affective employment relations and institutional structures of labour and migration law. It challenges the current emphasis on the language of exploitation and legal approaches to identifying, understanding and rectifying poor employment conditions for women migrant domestic workers. This book addresses the limited research literature that examines the extent to which regulatory or criminal justice responses are relevant to, and utilised by, women migrant domestic workers in their everyday negotiation of safe work and offers a unique contribution to the field. An accessible and compelling read, it will be of interest to researchers from across the fields of criminology, sociology, labour migration studies and women’s studies.

What is surveillance, and why should we care? Why are those who use technology susceptible to being both agents and targets of contemporary surveillance practices? Working Through Surveillance and Technical Communication addresses these questions, discussing what it means to engage in surveillance, examining why this participation may be problematic, and offering entry points into assessing one's ethical and socially just involvement with surveillance. Further, the book suggests ways to resist both individually and collectively, and it offers pedagogical entry points for those looking to talk about surveillance with others. Led by the central questions, "How are technical communicators also surveillance workers?" and "Why does this matter for technical communication and surveillance scholarship?" the text uses the example of Edward Snowden to illustrate how technical communicators and surveillance workers exist on an often-overlapping range. Sarah Young highlights the potentially discriminatory nature of surveillance and argues that recognizing and evaluating surveillance in is increasingly important in a data-driven world. Open Access funded by Erasmus University Rotterdam Library in support of open science initiatives. It can be found in the SUNY Open Access Repository at a href="https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/8546"https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/8546a.

First Published in 2007. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Although most Canadians are familiar with surveillance cameras and airport security, relatively few are aware of the extent to which the potential for surveillance is now embedded in virtually every aspect of our lives. We cannot walk down a city street, register for a class, pay with a credit card, hop on an airplane, or make a telephone call without data being captured and processed. Where does such information go? Who makes use of it, and for what purpose? Is the loss of control over our personal information merely the price we pay for using social media and other forms of electronic communication, or should we be wary of systems that make us visible—and thus vulnerable—to others as never before? The work of a multidisciplinary research team, Transparent Lives explains why and how surveillance is expanding—mostly unchecked—into every facet of our lives. Through an investigation of the major ways in which both government and private sector organizations gather, monitor, analyze, and share information about ordinary citizens, the volume identifies nine key trends in the processing of personal data that together raise urgent questions of privacy and social justice. Intended not only to inform but to make a difference, the volume is deliberately aimed at a broad audience, including legislators and policymakers, journalists, civil liberties groups, educators, and, above all, the reading public. http://surveillanceincanada.org/