The second of two pieces with the Centre for International Governance Innovation – Control Creep explores how data produced for one purpose inevitably spreads to new (mis)uses and relations of control:
“The trouble with thinking about data as personal property, however, is that what our data means for us has little to do with what it can be made to mean for others. Being paid for our data will not empower us if that data is still being recombined into unappealable judgments by cops or bosses.“
This month, I reviewed Sarah E. Igo’s The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard, 2018) for The New Rambler.
I focus on Igo’s history as a history of privacy never quite fulfilled, a history of partial protections won only through sustained criticism and outrage – and then often extended disparately across society, ‘divvying up civic membership’ in ways that maintain longstanding inequalities.
(I also draw on Igo’s work to talk about privacy in Technologies of Speculation, where I argue that “to talk privacy in the data-driven society is to not demand a hermetic seal between private and public but to demand more humanly meaningful access to the ways in which bodies are datafied and manipulated at a distance.”)
Below is a loose collection of COVID surveillance developments around the world. We see tales of unproven, hastily duct-taped contact tracing apps that run headlong into predictable train wrecks in actual use cases; thermal cameras that don’t work; fantasies of drone and robot surveillance; and almost comically harmful renditions of workplace surveillance & exam proctoring.
It is a partial, eclectic collection of whatever I spotted between early March & early May (updates potentially to come), but some folks have found it useful so I am putting it up here. Disclaimer that the notes are often going to be messy & full of my initial, personal views. Any questions / errors / concerns let me know at sun_ha [at] sfu.ca!
Continue reading “Some resources on COVID surveillance” →I recently spoke to Trevor Paglen – well known for works like ‘Limit Telephotography’ (2007-2012) and its images of NSA buildings and deep-sea fibreoptic cables – about surveillance, machine vision, and the changing politics of the visible / machine-readable. Full piece @ Art in America.
Much of that discussion – around the proliferation of images created by and for machines, and the exponential expansion of pathways by which surveillance, data, and capital can profitably intersect – is also taken up in my upcoming book, Technologies of Speculation (NYUP 2020). There my focus is on what happens after Snowden’s leaks – the strange symbiosis of transparency and conspiracy, the lingering unknowability of surveillance apparatuses and the terrorists they chase. It also examines the passage from the vision of the Quantified Self, where we use all these smart machines to hack ourselves and know ourselves better, to the Quantified Us/Them which plugs that data back into the circuits of surveillance capitalism.
In the piece, Paglen also discusses his recent collaboration with Kate Crawford on ImageNet Roulette, also on display at the Training Humans exhibition (Fondazione Prada Osservertario, Milan):
“Some of my work, like that in “From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly,’” asks what vision algorithms see and how they abstract images. It’s an installation of about 30,000 images taken from a widely used dataset of training images called ImageNet. Labeling images is a slippery slope: there are 20,000 categories in ImageNet, 2,000 of which are of people. There’s crazy shit in there! There are “jezebel” and “criminal” categories, which are determined solely on how people look; there are plenty of racist and misogynistic tags.
If you just want to train a neural network to distinguish between apples and oranges, you feed it a giant collection of example images. Creating a taxonomy and defining the set in a way that’s intelligible to the system is often political. Apples and oranges aren’t particularly controversial, though reducing images to tags is already horrifying enough to someone like an artist: I’m thinking of René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pomme (This is Not an Apple) [1964]. Gender is even more loaded. Companies are creating gender detection algorithms. Microsoft, among others, has decided that gender is binary—man and woman. This is a serious decision that has huge political implications, just like the Trump administration’s attempt to erase nonbinary people.”
Crawford & Paglen also have a longer read on training sets, Excavating AI (also source for above image).
New article now available on open access @ Surveillance & Society.
Abstract:
The current debate on surveillance, both academic and public, is constantly tempted towards a ‘negative’ criticism of present surveillance systems. In contrast, a ‘positive’ critique would be one which seeks to present alternative ways of thinking, evaluating, and even undertaking surveillance. Surveillance discourse today propagates a host of normative claims about what is admissible as true, probable, efficient – based upon which it cannot fail to justify its own expansion. A positive critique questions and subverts this epistemological foundation. It argues that surveillance must be held accountable by terms other than those of its own making. The objective is an open debate not only about ‘surveillance or not’, but the possibility of ‘another surveillance’.
To demonstrate the necessity of this shift, I first examine two existing frames of criticism. Privacy and humanism (appeal to human rights, freedoms and decency) are necessary but insufficient tools for positive critique. They implicitly accept surveillance’s bargain of trade-offs: the benefit of security measured against the cost of rights. To demonstrate paths towards positive critique, I analyse risk and security: two load-bearing concepts that hold up existing rationalisations of surveillance. They are the ‘openings’ for reforming those evaluative paradigms and rigged bargains on offer today.
Sun-ha Hong