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The Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0:
How Web 2.0 platforms act as
Infrastructures of Dataveillance
Michael Zimmer
Department of Culture and Communication
New York University
www.michaelzimmer.org
Rhetoric of Web 2.0
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Organize and share information
Interact within communities
Express oneself
Empower creativity
Democratize media production
Celebrate the individual
Power of collaboration and social networks
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Externalities 2.0
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Increased flow of personal information
Aggregation of data across the network
Intelligent agents that predict your needs
Rise of data mining
Placing these tools in hands of all users.
Externalities 2.0
• Infrastructures of dataveillance
• Panoptic gaze
• Search 2.0
• Amateur Data Mining
• P2P Surveillance
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Panoptic Gaze of Dataveillance
Panoptic Gaze of Dataveillance
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Panopticon
“The more constantly
the persons to be
inspected are under
the eyes of the
persons who should
inspect them, the
more perfectly will
the purpose of the
establishment have
been attained.”
“This being impossible,
the next thing to be
wished for is, that, at
every instant, seeing
reason to believe as
much, and not being
able to satisfy himself
to the contrary, he [the
watched] should
conceive himself to be
so.”
Panopticon
• Perpetual
surveillance
• Minimal
effort
“induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent
visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”
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Panoptic Gaze
“There is no need for arms, physical violence, material
constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which
each individual under its weight will end by internalizing to
the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus
exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A
superb formula: power exercised continuously and for
what turns out to be a minimal cost.”
Panoptic Gaze
• Quintessential disciplinary apparatus of
modern, everyday life
– Home
– School
– Workplace
– Hospital
“a whole complex mechanism, embracing…stricter methods
of surveillance [and] more efficient techniques of locating
and obtaining information”
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Power via Panoptic Gaze
• Everyday functioning of power
– Panoptic sort
– Social sorting
(Gandy)
(Lyon)
• Sorting ≈ Exercise of power
– (Foucault; Bowker & Star; Lyon)
“…sorts people into categories, assigning worth or risk, in
ways that have real effects on their life-chances. Deep
discrimination occurs, thus making sorting not merely a
matter of personal privacy, but of social justice”
Panoptic Gaze of Dataveillance
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Panoptic Gaze of Dataveillance
Dataveillance
• Collection and storage of personal data
• Systemic use of personal data in investigation or
monitoring of individuals
– Roger Clarke, 1988
• Rise of digital dossiers
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Digital Dataveillance
• Digital networking
• Data storage
• Processing power
Frequent shopper cards
• Interconectivity
• Aggregation
• Real-time analysis
Electronic key cards
Intelligent transportation systems
RFID tags
Biometrics
Internet Dataveillance
• Ideal infrastructure of dataveillance
• Widespread monitoring and collection of
personal information
– Cookies
– Spyware
– DRM
– Clickstream
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Panoptic Gaze of Dataveillance
Panoptic Gaze of Dataveillance
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Panoptic Gaze of Dataveillance
Panoptic Gaze of Dataveillance
• Concrete, material effects
– Discrimination
– Social justice
– Personal freedom
“[The] impact of dataveillance is a reduction in the meaningfulness of
individual actions, and hence in self- reliance and self- responsibility.
…In general, mass dataveillance tends to subvert individualism and the
meaningfulness of human decisions and actions”
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Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0
• Search 2.0
• Amateur Data Mining
• P2P Surveillance
Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0
• Search 2.0
• Amateur Data Mining
• P2P Surveillance
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Search as Center of Gravity
• 84% have used a search engine
• 60 million users send 200 million requests
per day
(U.S. data)
Search engines have become the center of gravity for
people’s everyday information-seeking activities
Search 2.0
• Drive towards the “perfect search”
• Intuitive results based on past searches and
browsing history
• Perfect recall
“Like the mind of God”
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Dataveillance in Search 2.0
• Engage in dataveillance of users’ online
activities
– Server logs
– Web cookies
– User accounts
Dataveillance in Search 2.0
• Majority of users unaware of dataveillance
– DOJ v. Google
– AOL data
• Some try to avoid dataveillance
– IP routing
– Cookie blocking
– Obfuscation
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Google’s Broader Dataveillance
Infrastructure
• Dataveillance across all products & services
• Intellectual activities across the web as well
as the material world
Google’s Broader Dataveillance
Infrastructure
• General information inquiries:
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Google’s Broader Dataveillance
Infrastructure
• Academic research:
• News & political information:
Google’s Broader Dataveillance
Infrastructure
• Communication & social networking:
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Google’s Broader Dataveillance
Infrastructure
• Personal data :
• Financial data :
• Shopping & product interests:
• Desktop computer files:
Google’s Broader Dataveillance
Infrastructure
• Internet browsing:
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Google’s Broader Dataveillance
Infrastructure
• Over two dozen products & services
• Interconnected via cookies & Google
Accounts
Search 2.0’s Gravitational Pull
• Feedback loop ~ gravitational pull
• Database of intentions
Source of insight into what someone is thinking,
not just what that person is doing
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Panoptic Gaze of Search 2.0
• Disciplinary power
– Deleted Gmail messages as evidence
– Search history “neck snap break”
• Storage of records
– China
– Brazil
Panoptic Gaze of Search 2.0
• Panoptic sorting
– Financial motivations
– Profile users potential economic value
“Google knows a lot about the person surfing,
especially if they have used personal search or logged
into a service such as Gmail”
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Panoptic Gaze of Search 2.0
• State of consciousness & visibility
– “My goodness, it’s my whole personal life…I
had no idea somebody was looking over my
shoulder”
• Tools to circumvent
– FoxyProxy
– TrackMeNot
Resisting Search 2.0
• Expanding the infrastructure of
dataveillance:
• Easy to take at “interface value”
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Resisting Search 2.0
• Collection of personal information
becomes a prerequisite of participation
– “oscillates between seemingly rewarding
participation and punishing attempts to elect
not to divulge personal information”
• Default settings
Panoptic Gaze of Search 2.0
• Social, political, and technical infrastructure
that renders visualization meaningful for the
basis of disciplinary social control
• Emergence of a “soft cage” of dataveillance
– Individual freedom
– Concept of self
– Social justice
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Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0
• Search 2.0
• Amateur Data Mining
• P2P Surveillance
Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0
• Search 2.0
• Amateur Data Mining
• P2P Surveillance
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Don, the Camera Thief
[email protected]
Lonelygirl15
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Farrand Field
Farrand Field
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Amateur Facial Recognition
Riya
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Riya
Riya
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Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0
• Amateur Data Mining
• Peer to Peer Surveillance
• Search 2.0
Values in technology design…
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