News Archive: 2007

Bart Simon Associate Professor Department of Sociology and Anthropology Concordia University

Playing with the Databased Self: Perfect Surveillance in the Age of Virtual Worlds

Thursday, November 15th Location: Mackintosh-Corry Hall, Room D411 Time: 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Forget about CCTV, ID cards and genetic profiling, massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds like The World of Warcraft represent the apotheosis of the post-panoptic dreams of our modern culture. These places, where we increasingly occupy more and more of our leisure time, offer us what Foucault called "diagrams" of perfect surveillance and control. Each person in these spaces is rendered as a perfectly intelligible relation of data more manageable, more manipulable and more predictable than any population envisaged by Babbage's first calculating machines, or criminal database, or market profile. Read more about @title...

Shanly Dixon PhD Candidate Humanities Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program Concordia University

"MySpace is No Place for Moms; Regulation and Surveillance of Young People's Play"

Thursday, November 1st Location: Mackintosh-Corry Hall, Room D528 Time: 12:30 to 1:30 pm

From the spaces of playgrounds and parks to neighborhood streets, public space no longer appears safe for young people. As their play, leisure time and social activities become increasingly organized and supervised by adults, children's autonomous play moves indoors into the domestic space of playrooms and bedrooms. Adults equip children's domestic space with technologically enticing alternatives to public space in an effort to keep them safely inside. Households become 'media saturated' spaces. Read more about @title...

Thursday, October 18th, Mackintosh-Corry Hall, Room B503, 12:30 to 1:30 pm.

Elin Palm, PhD Candidate - Department of Philosophy The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

"Strengthening Employees' Negotiating Power: The Importance of Contextualized Consent"

Thursday, October 18th, Mackintosh-Corry Hall, Room B503, 12:30 to 1:30 pm.

The starting point of this presentation is that employees' chances of securing reasonable expectations of privacy at work must be better protected. Prevailing privacy protection legislation accommodates one single dimension of privacy leaving central aspects aside. Whereas workers' personal data enjoys legal protection, their need for local privacy at work is not supported by privacy protection law. Moreover, a dependency asymmetry between employer and job-applicant implies that prospective employees are in a disadvantaged position vis à vis the employer regarding the chances of defending their reasonable interests. Read more about @title...

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has created a "Surveillance Clock" -- a graphical dramatization of just how close we are getting to the midnight of a true surveillance society.

Americans above a certain age probably remember the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' "Doomsday Clock." Created in 1947 and used throughout the Cold War, the Doomsday Clock dramatized the threat of nuclear war by moving its hands closer or further away from "midnight" as the threat of nuclear war with the Soviets ebbed and flowed. Read more about @title...

The world of the 21st century is, more than ever, global and impersonal. Criminal and terrorist threats, both physical and on the internet, increase by the day. The demand for better methods of identification and access control is growing, not only in companies and organisations but also in the world at large. Identity management is put under pressure, due to the growing number of frauds who want to hide their true identity. Read more about @title...

Congratulations to David Lyon on his new book, Surveillance Studies: An Overview, now available from Polity Publishers. Read more about @title...

Susan Sproule and Norm Archer have been involved in a program of research on identity theft funded by the Ontario Research Network in Electronic Commerce (ORNEC). This program has brought together researchers from academic fields as diverse as business, law, and computer science, with subject matter experts from both the private and public sectors. This talk will describe the approach that was used to develop a common understanding of the problem domain that could be used by this diverse group of stakeholders. It will also present some preliminary findings from a consumer survey that was conducted in December 2006. The survey was designed to determine the incidence rate and characteristics of identity theft in Canada. It also asked respondents to indicate their acceptance of various measures that consumers, businesses and governments might take to protect personal information from loss or theft. Read more about @title...

Counter-Surveillance in an Algorithmic World James Dutrisac M.Sc. Student, Department of Computing, Queen's University Supervised by: David Skillicorn

Currently counter-surveillance focuses mainly upon either subverting the process of collection (e.g. wearing a rubber mask), or subverting the action (e.g. changing one's name to suggest a different ethnicity). However, both of these approaches ignore a considerable part of the surveillance process, the analysis of the surveillance data. It is the analysis of surveillance data that allows for the building of the models that are used to sort people and objects. This work consists of two major components, the first of which is the delineation of the stages of surveillance, of which we argue that there are three: the collection, the analysis, and the action. In the next phase of this research we consider exactly what counter-surveillance means at the analysis stage. To do this, we explore how data may be manipulated to subvert analysis. We analyse three data-mining techniques, classification using both decision trees and support vector machines, and the development of assoociation rules using the a priori algorithm. Each of these commonly used algorithms have unsuspected and significant vulnerabilities that may be easily exploited. Read more about @title...

The technological revolution of the 1990s has profoundly changed the way that information flows in society. Every day we send numerous emails, make unprecedented numbers of calls, and make many of our purchases using online applications. We go about our business and studies everyday using online tools.

While this period of technological change has facilitated rapid economic development and advancement in a relatively short period of time, there have been unseen costs, largely in the domain of privacy. All of our online activities, from purchases to emails to internet visits, are monitored by businesses as a means of gaining greater consumer information. This erosion of personal privacy has altered the relationship between consumers and business, giving business unprecedented informational power. Read more about @title...

Diane Kelly Access & Privacy Coordinator Queen's University

This talk, originally scheduled for Feb 15, has been postponed. The new date/time will be published as soon as possible.

The Ontario Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act was recently amended to include Ontario universities and, as of June 2006, Queen's is governed by that legislation. The purpose of the legislation is to give the public access to university records and to protect personal information collected by universities. Kelly will discuss the issues which have arisen in the context of the implementation of this legislation which was developed to govern provincial government agencies. Read more about @title...

Jennifer Whitson "Securing the Self: Consumer responses to dataveillance, information 'leaks' and identity theft" Department of Sociology and Anthropology Carleton University

Using the example of identity theft, Whitson suggests that institutionally promoted informational security measures encourage the fashioning of a particular form of subject; a hyper-vigilant citizen whose daily routines, home environment, consumption patterns and sense of self is being brought into accord with power dynamics characteristic of an informational age. While citizens are encouraged by the specter of identity theft to reduce personal risks and maximize the potentialities related to their data doubles, available securitization methods are rooted in institutional self-interest and quests for profit. In responding to occurrences of identity theft, victimized citizens occupy a position traditionally held by offenders. They become the primary object of statistics, trend predictions, risk profiling, and surveillance in general and commonly suffer more from the bureaucratic trials necessary to re-establish their identity then from the initial victimization itself. Read more about @title...