Surveillance (Essay Sample)

Privacy and Surveillance Student’s name University Course Professor Date Privacy and Surveillance Surveillance is the observation of people's movements and behaviours to influence, manage, or protect them. Organizations can sometimes conduct surveillance in secret. Disease surveillance, for example, monitors the spread of a disease within a community (WSI technologies, 2016). CCTV cameras, for example, can be used to intercept Internet data or phone calls. Postal interception and human intelligence operatives are examples of low-tech surveillance. Surveillance helps governments maintain control over individuals, identify and monitor threats, and prevent crime (WSI technologies, 2016). Surveillance can have both beneficial and negative consequences. This paper focuses on understanding privacy as a surveillance problem and how to deal with it. Privacy refers to the freedom to keep private information about a person or activities and to do so selectively. Privacy can be a person or group (Bloustein, 2018). People who value their privacy are more likely to be sensitive or special than those who don't value their privacy. Privacy and security share several principles, such as the proper use and protection of information, which sometimes overlap (Post, 2000). According to Finn et al., (2013), privacy can be of body, intimate relations, personal information and space, psychological, emotional and financial. Technology enables us to communicate with the rest of the world, stay connected with our loved ones, and organize for social change. However, the government and businesses may use these same capabilities to spy on innocent people, muzzle dissenting voices, persecute communities of colour, and violate everyone's right to privacy in the name of national security. The surveillance theory was first developed by utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, the panopticon designer (Wood, 2021). The design was initially made for a prison with all the cells clear and flooded with light in a circle formation with a guard tower at the centre (Kaschadt, 2002). It was designed such that one guard could watch over all the prisoners at once, and the prisoners could not see the guard. The idea was to reform the prisoners due to the feeling of being watched and maintaining good behaviour (Wood, 2021). Bentham made it clear that the design was not only for prisons and could be used for institutions where monitoring was required (Bentham, 1791). The initial design was created by Jeremy’s brother Samuel for a factory so that all the workers could do their job well (Wood, 2021). Over the years, the design of the panopticon kept improving, and ways were developed of hearing conversations. This way, the prisoners were robbed of the privacy of their actions and their words. Also, during these times, the public was allowed to view how reformed the prisoners were, which may have caused an adverse reaction from the prisoners, which led to people refusing the procedures of the said institutions. No matter what they had done wrong, these individuals were still human beings and deserved respect like everyone else. Being watched by the guards was allowed since it was a prison, but public viewing was extreme. That is why society's trust in those institutions was lost. The theory of surveillance was furthered by French writer Michel Foucault, the author of discipline and punish. Foucault takes us through how punishment was done in medieval times; how it was a show of power and authority to carry out very harsh, inhumane punishments to wrongdoers in public (Foucault, 1977). His review of Bentham’s panoptic became panopticism (Wood, 2021). According to him, the reformatory system was supposed to be celebrated. Foucault also spoke about subjectification which was surveillance that employed biopolitics (Foucault, 1977). There existed the categories of the governors and the governed; governmentality (Foucault, 1977). The modern-day form of this is the online surveillance done by the government. This kind of surveillance has not reduced the percentage of crimes committed but has created a delicate issue. Online surveillance has resulted in invasions of privacy, as everything that users access is recorded and disseminated without their knowledge or consent. Government monitoring in the United States has not had a significant detrimental impact on society because the information saved is not utilized. There was no action done to prevent crimes and terrorist acts, and the massive storage of personal data in the past years resulted in cases of privacy violations. Since government eavesdropping creates potential threats to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberties, domestic programs that allow significant amounts of data to be collected and maintained must be terminated (Moore, 2011). The law would remove the government's obligation for bulk telephony metadata storage and leave it on the shoulders of the telecommunications industry. Governments and law enforcement organizations have utilized surveillance to abuse their authority (Moore, 2011). The vast majority of people believe that a group with this much power may readily exploit others. There have been cases of blackmail, framing, and other controversies due to observations conducted through specialized techniques. Whenever we are in a public place, we are almost certainly being monitored by some surveillance technology. It has become so commonplace in the last decade that we hardly think about looking for them, even though the vast majority of them are hidden. Furthermore, social media is a type of surveillance in the sense that any material posted has the potential to be seen by virtually everyone on the planet, including potential employers, schools, and law enforcement (Duffy & Chan, 2019). As technology improves, it becomes more difficult to protect one's privacy rights. Stalking and other worrisome scenarios, such as being videotaped by another person while going about their everyday business, are also reported daily. Allowing the broader public access to monitoring makes the entire community be severely compromised. Thousands of people have been falsely charged due to the revelation of recordings and internet records. Every day, nearly 1,500 audio and video records requests are made in the United Kingdom alone. Businesses are increasingly examining our comments and comparing them to the words of someone who poses an actual threat to their operations (Duffy & Chan, 2019). In the early 2000s, a man from the United States was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Ten years after being imprisoned, it was discovered that he was innocent, and he was released on bond. In this case, surveillance footage was utilized against him, and he was falsely convicted due to the evidence given. Whether or not tangible evidence is uncovered, surveillance is still considered concrete evidence. In many circumstances, it can result in the false conviction of many persons (Duffy & Chan, 2019). Surveillance footage alone should not be used in court to convict someone. Rather, the suspected party should be allowed a trial and be listened to and not destroy their lives without having a chance to voice their opinions. There were many other philosophers of the surveillance theory who came after Foucault. One of them was Gilles Deleuze, who believed that Bentham's theory of soul reformation and Foucault's subjectification were no longer important (Deleuze, 1992). He believed that the flow was what was important and was the one who saw surveillance as making constituents out of subjects (Deleuze, 1992). According to him, Systems can begin delivering launches almost anywhere, and groupings are made up of linked devices that work as a unit to give flows more permanence (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). It no longer mattered why people did what they did. He likened data collected in multiple databases to multiple bodies used differently. The multiple databases today's main source of data is social media. Some industry watchers believe users of social networking websites to be engaging in a sort of participatory surveillance. They disclose personal information about public services for anyone to view. To obtain personal information from future or present employees, around 15% of businesses use social media. If an employer looks at a personal Facebook page or if a school runs a "sweep" through student social media accounts, any information recorded may become public. If they have an unfavourable perception of anything, an individual may suffer long-term consequences. Using social media, email, and texting apps allows police enforcement to easily obtain a vast amount of information about a person and their actions. Like physical proof, media proof is accepted as acceptable evidence (Wood, 2021). Human beings are social beings, and they have very different ideas about what the correct lifestyle is or what a normal social life looks like. Social media gives people the freedom to express themselves most comfortably. Social media surveillance limits this freedom, which makes people hide or stay in their shells when they would have probably brought wonderful inventions or gotten help if needed. In a way, the surveillance is causing people to suffer and should only be limited to suspicious accounts and even those, the data collected should be authorized. One of the earliest philosophers in the surveillance field was Karl Marx; even though the word he used was direction, the meaning is similar. He was concerned with work surveillance, more like what Samuel Bentham wanted to do to his factory, except that there was no panopticon this time. Marx was a great supporter of capitalism (Wood, 2021). He believed in forcing labourers to work for factory owners, who would accumulate wealth from the surplus value of labour. However, for this to happen, cooperation had to be ensured, leading to a quasi-military syst...