A Day in the Digital Life: A Preliminary Sousveillance Study

A decade ago, Castells argued that most surveillance would have no directly damaging consequences. He proposed that what should be of more concern were the unpredictable consequences of our over-exposed lives, the lack of explicit rules for on-line behaviour and how this then was interpreted by a ‘multitude of little sisters’ who process and store this information, forever (Castells 2001:180). A decade later, these conjectures are still valid but are now at a critical level as individuals passively volunteer personal information while government and commercial organisations aggressively amass these snippets into correlated data. As boundaries between on-line and off-line blur, and geo-locative applications grow in popularity, we echo Castells by asking, what will be, and what are, the privacy implications of existing in a technologically saturated environment? The human data trail now begins prior to conception and continues after death. We aim to develop a methodology to enable us to quantify this trail and to examine the impact that such amassment of data has on society, communities, and personal identities within the UK. The reality is that the digital footprint is a significant research challenge to identify and then quantify. There is a critical need to capture relevant activities in a holistic and interconnected manner in order to enable understanding of the societal implications. We describe a preliminary study which will be used as a starting point to develop appropriate methods for quantification and analysis of the 21 century digital footprint. Finding the Digital Footprint There is a lack of established functional research methodologies that provide sufficient structure or clarity of resolution to aid the collection and analysis of data surrounding individual digital footprints. Attempting to track and document an individual’s digital footprint requires a high degree of methodological pluralism given that data is drawn from a diverse range of digital and analogue settings. As researchers we will be (re)turning the gaze back onto those watching, data harvesting and monitoring society by examining the decentralised and uncoordinated methods employed to collect personal digital data. Thus this study becomes an inverse surveillance or ‘sousveillance’ exercise1. The major focus of this preliminary study is to develop methods to capture individuals' digital footprints as they use and come into contact with Internet, surveillance, communications and database technologies over a 24-hour period. We have employed a broad range of technologies to detect and identify this footprint including GPS, phone records, key-logging software, video technology, as well as direct observation in an endeavour to interrogate all of the digital activity a person generates, initiates or is associated with over this brief period of time. By combining a blend of critical and virtual ethnographic approaches (Cecez-Kecmanovic 2001; Hine 2000) we report on the process of capturing two individuals’ exposure to digital and surveillance technologies over a 24 hour period. The approach is at least partially inspired by the exploratory ‘garbage’ studies of Rathje and Murphy (2001). In this earlier work, first conducted in 1973 in Tuscon, the examination of discarded material items assisted in determining actual consumption patterns rather than those conventionally reported through subsequent surveying or forms of direct participant observation. We 1 Mann, S. (2005) Sousveillance and Cyborglogs: A 30-Year Empirical Voyage through Ethical, Legal, and Policy Issue, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto can then identify, categorise and describe the shape of a personal digital footprint and attempt to establish which elements of a digital footprint are stored by commercial or governmental organisations. Further work will include graphically mapping this footprint in conjunction with researcher and artist Heath Bunting, who has developed an identity mapping toolkit as a result of his own concerns and interests around this topic. We aim for these actions to become a starting point to develop both a repeatable methodology and a clearer understanding of the consequences of the rapid and uncritical adoption of public digital technologies for individual privacy and identity. In an attempt to unravel the closely entwined notions of privacy and identity this paper is organised at follows: we first discuss the concept of privacy and surveillance technologies, From this point we then endeavour to isolate identity and present a number of definitions or terms of reference of identity, digital footprint that will be adopted for this study. We introduce Heath Bunting’s work and present the design, development and the investigational process of the Day in the Digital Life (DDL) study. The paper closes with a discussion on the complexities of designing a workable methodology and how findings from this research process will be incorporated into the future work to capture individual Days in the Digital Life. Privacy in a Technologically Saturated World Wajcman (2002) claims that societies across the world are experiencing historically, unprecedented change as they try to adapt to a more interconnected but highly uncertain world (2002: 347). It would be reasonable to append to Wajcman's observation that the pace of change has intensified in the subsequent decade in a multitude of technologies and activities, all of which are increasingly 'networked' and producing still greater levels uncertainty. Recent examples such as the 'Arab Spring', near ubiquitous social networking, and both the CCTV-led response by the constabulary to the UK riots as well as the subsequent “I love my city” campaigns can all be regarded as indicative of this observation. The current study focuses its attention, amongst all of these examples of change and uncertainty, upon the notion of privacy and the growth of surveillance against the backdrop of a heavily technologically mediated social world.