Pitfalls of Self-Surveillance

In his book, Surveillance Unlimited: How We've Become The Most Watched People On Earth, Keith Lauder (2008) argues that the government, organisations, and especially new media have been encouraging us to be get updated regularly as well as be tracked easily via technologies, systems and rules. From using digital ID card to access doors until the need to be online all the time so people begin carrying smartphone anywhere. Eventually people start living that way voluntarily to survive in work places and schools. Creating a surveillance society where people partaking in watching themselves an also others' activities, which often entitled as self-surveillance. This matter has resulted in both benefits and disadvantages for the people which will be discussed further in this essay.

PITFALLS

Privacy

One of the core arguments against surveillance is that it poses a threat to privacy, which is of value to the individual and to society. This raises a number of questions about privacy, what it is and to what extent and why it is valuable.

Much of the early work on privacy was carried out in the legal realm, particularly in the United States. Warren and Brandeis' The Right to Privacy (Warren and Brandeis 1890) is generally taken as the first attempt to define the concept of privacy. Here the authors claim that the right to privacy is an instance of the "right to be let alone" and establish limits to that right, arguing that it is not absolute. Developments in technology then gave rise to defining legal cases, such as Katz v. United States (1967) which related privacy and surveillance to the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution (forbidding unreasonable search and seizure by the state). Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) then established that the right to privacy involved the right to make important choices without government intervention, drawing a connection between privacy and autonomy. This was drawn upon in Roe vs. Wade (1972) to argue for a woman's rights in abortion.

In the aftermath of these legal decisions the concept of privacy was increasingly debated by philosophers. Judith Jarvis Thomson (Thomson 1975) argued that the right to privacy consists of a cluster of rights which overlap with both property rights and rights of the person. She held that there are no privacy rights which do not overlap with clusters of other rights, and so there is no distinct right to privacy. A violation of someone's right to privacy only occurs when one of these other rights has also been violated in a relevant manner. Hence the illicit viewing of another's diary involves a breach of his right to dispose of his property as he sees fit; extracting information through torture involves a violation of someone's right not to be injured. In both cases there is a violation of a person's privacy, but this is only because other, more fundamental rights have been violated.

Thomas Scanlon (Scanlon 1975) responded by arguing that Thomson's analysis was convoluted and counter-intuitive. Instead he proposed that we have socially-defined zones of privacy which enable us to act with the assumption that we are not being monitored. These zones are motivated by our interest in not having to be alert to specific observation at all times. James Rachels (Rachels 1975), responding to both Thomson and Scanlon, argued that privacy was rather a matter of relationships. In defining our relationships with others, we use varying degrees of privacy to establish intimacy. With a stranger we uphold a high degree of privacy, whilst with a close family member we may have and expect much less privacy. Indeed, he argued, what it means to be a friend is for the relationship to involve less privacy than would otherwise be the case.

More recently W.A. Parent (Parent 1983) argued that privacy involved the control of undocumented information about oneself. This has been contested by Jeffrey Reimann (Reiman 2004) and Tony Doyle (Doyle 2009), who hold that privacy is not restricted to information. A porn star whose body is freely available for all to see may still have his or her privacy violated if spied upon in his or her own home. Daniel Nathan (Nathan 1990) and Danah Boyd (Boyd 2010) agree with Parent that control is an important issue, while Herman Tavani and James Moor (Tavani and Moor 2001) hold that privacy relates more accurately to the access another has to me than to who controls the information about me.

Despite the disagreements, most would agree that on an individual level, privacy affords us the space to be ourselves and to define ourselves through giving us a degree of autonomy and protecting our dignity. In our interactions with others we may define the intimacy of our relationships with them through the amount of privacy we relinquish in that relationship. As we engage with society at large we gain confidence and security from our privacy, safe that those we do not know do not in