A Lagging Round Up: The People, The Law and Conclusions

Well it's certainly been a long time since I've written one of these, but the information that I've gathered in the meantime should more than make up for it. However, for this post I'm going to simply focus on the end of David Lyon's book (which I've previously been commenting on), and the conclusions he draws as he wraps up the growing concept of a surveillance society. In the last 120 or so pages of his book, Mr. Lyon begins to focus not only in on the effect that the growing surveillance society has on the public (and their reactions to it), but also spends some time critiquing and analyzing the various laws that are (and are not) in place to help protect us and our own privacy. Now starting with the impact on the citizens of the world and the general reaction to the concept of modern surveillance, Lyon admits that there lies one major difference in people when it comes to perceptions of surveillance and that difference lies mostly in the status of these individuals. For instance, he cites both Chairman Mao of Japan and Joseph Stalin of Russia as men who in their time advocated surveillance and the inclusion of privacy on a public scale as ways to balance and regulate the young countries both of them were leading. Noting other former world leaders, Lyon explores the historical growth of surveillance from simply keeping tabs to the new concept of "Big Brother" and its relevance in modern society. But the Chairman Mao's of the world are not the majority. As one statistic in Lyon's book notes, 70% of individuals admitted that they wanted to hold on to their privacy very dearly and would much prefer a society in which the government asked them each time before gathering data on them. In addition, people believed almost unanimously that the governments of the world should help regulate and stop the free sharing of information between corporations. Now this ties back into earlier information that Lyon explores into that the groups who actually profit the most from data collection and information on individuals are large corporations or companies. True, there is often sharing that also goes on between governments and corporations (especially in a much more recent sense with applications such as Facebook helping to share information or even the creation of camera networks in cities encompassing both the private and public systems of surveillance). However the fact that information is now more easily gathered and shared than ever is a scary thought. An article in a state paper a few weeks ago noted a girl who at age 12 experienced a traumatic sexual experience, and the photos taken of the event were still pursuing her to the present day.

The question to ask in these scenarios however is the subject of Lyon's next exploration. Looking into the laws that govern surveillance, Lyon notes only one real conclusion. The laws protecting privacy and limiting information gathering and sharing in the US and abroad have one thing in common, they're all weak. Exploring laws in countries such as Australia, the US, and Canada, Lyon shows that there are relatively few laws on the books that protect against  corporations sharing of information. Now whether or not this is a planned set of actions in order to also protect the government's right to share information I can't say, though I wouldn't be surprised. The essential problem with this however is that, while the sharing of information can be harmful when it's limited to data and names, when you start to mix in more modern technologies such as facial matching and cross-records searches of a person's entire life, their life and who they've always been comes to take over the process. Essentially, their life becomes the property of the government, and as Lyon notes several times, privacy in this sense becomes property.

But what general conclusions does Lyon come to draw? Firstly he states that it is undeniable that the field, range, and capacity of surveillance is expanding exponentially with every year. There is more that can be recorded each year, and with the advancement of technology there are every day more ways to gather it. This also leads into his second conclusion, which is that technology is making the ability to watch and enable a "Big Brother" society a far more realizable and possible future. Technology is increasing the range of surveillance, and maximizing it's capacity 10-fold. However, it is his final conclusion that is possibly the most significant. Thirdly, Lyon concludes, is that the sharing of information is fundamentally changing the way people interact. People are becoming data cards, nothing more than the information they make available to everyone. Though Lyon wrote this in 1994, this holds more truth now than anything else. Between Facebook, social dating sites, or even online colleges and application, people are now more than ever just a collection of words on a computer. Disregarding the social connotations of this, what can we say it says about privacy? In my opinion it makes privacy a very internal thing, and only the information we choose not to share at this point, is what can be considered private. Anything else in this day and age, well that may as well be public property.