Article:
Trottier, D. (2014). Police and user-led investigations on social media. JL Inf. & Sci., 23, 75.
Leader: Leanna
Summary:
The article explores top-down and bottom-up policing, the former referring to traditional policing and the latter to crowdsourced policing. Because social media has increased both visibility and, consequently, access to personal information, its existence has facilitated a convergence of the police and the public. To demonstrate this point, the author notes that social media centralizes and stores intelligence in one place. And everyone, and their brother, can now surveil. This includes surveillance for traditional policing as well as for public scrutinizing.
Continuing the discussion of everyday surveillance, Trottier discusses the domestication of social media in our lives. In particular, he points to surveillance creep, or function creep, which is the result of technology not being used for its intended function. With regards to traditional policing, the author discusses the shift in function of Facebook from a communication platform to police intelligence. And, with regards to the crowdsourcing, the public can now more easily engage with policing activities and, consequently, with fewer guiding protocols.
The author then spends the rest of his article providing three examples of policing activities with social media: police adoption of social media surveillance; crowdsourcing and the 2011 Vancouver riots; and, crowdsourced surveillance-businesses.
In the first example – police adoption of social media surveillance – Trottier outlines six different ways that the police can obtain information from social media, such as manual searches, directly via companies, combined manual and automated searches, lawful interception of messages, and embedded software. The sixth way that the author points toward—analysis—is arguably an outlier to his list and is best described separately. He simply lists various processes of analysis, such as temporal based reconstruction and sentiment analysis.
In the next example – the 2011 Vancouver riots – he then continues to describe the crowd’s involvement in social control immediately following the Vancouver Stanley Cup Riots of 2011. The mass number of photos online provided the police with an abundance of information – often before they even knew the identities of people involved in the riots.
Lastly, in the third example – crowdsourced surveillance-businesses – Trottier discusses various crowdsourced surveillance businesses, such as Blueservo, Internet Eye and Facewatch. Each capitalizes on the crowd to provide security services. For example, Internet Eyes uses crowdsourcing to monitor CCTVs for registered business owners. In return, after the viewer spends a fee to sign up, they receive compensation for their time and effort. In his discussion of Internet Eyes, he notes of the relatively recent trouble that the company has gotten into to, namely, growing privacy concerns among shoppers.
Reflection:
In his conversation about surveillance entering the domestic sphere, Trottier mentions that “The homestead and other non-commercial spaces were locations where people were comparatively free from surveillance” (para 9). From a sociological perspective, this view of surveillance appears to be rather myopic. For sure, surveillance is often becoming more commonplace and domesticated. However, many groups in society have never been free from surveillance. Black Americans, for example, have been under police and state scrutiny for years not only in public spheres but also in their private lives.
The observation that historically many people have been subject to comparatively high levels of surveillance is a non-trivial one. On one level, the increased attention being paid to the domestication of surveillance makes it seem that it was fine when Black Americans were being surveiled but that now, when White Americans are being surveiled, the encroachment of surveillance into personal spaces is overreach. And if this is the case, then the issue here is not the domestication of surveillance but that surveillance is now more indiscriminate.
In addition, Internet Eyes is fascinating but not only for its application of crowdsourcing security but also of worker exploitation. Businesses are capitalizing on crowdsourcing – arguably like the early days of industrialization. With relatively new technologies/approaches, regulations and policies fall fast behind. Like other crowdsourcing platforms, such as MTurk, worker compensation often does not balance anywhere near the minimum wage. It would not be surprising if crowdsource union groups soon emerged, so workers aren’t left with the option of participating for less than livable wages (assuming they don’t also work elsewhere) or not participating at all.
Questions:
- Are we acclimatized to surveillance in our everyday lives? If so, do some people not see the threat it poses to our civil liberties?
- What does it mean to consent to surveillance in digital public spaces? Can we reasonably op-out of social media, search, or email?
- Should social media be a tool for the police?
- What are some of the ethical concerns with crowdsourced security?
