Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy

Agre, Philip. "Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy." Original Publication Information Society 10.2: 101–127(April–June 1994). As of November 2021, available on line, The New Media Reader 51. "Surveillance and Capture," pp. 737--760[1]

From Agre's Introduction:

Cultural ideas about privacy are particularly significant right now, given the rapid emergence of new technologies and new policy issues around privacy. In this paper I propose to contrast two cultural models of privacy: The “surveillance model,” currently dominant in the public discourse of at least the English-speaking world, is built upon visual metaphors and derives from historical experiences of secret police surveillance. A less familiar alternative, the “capture model,” has manifested itself principally in the practices of information technologists; it is built upon linguistic metaphors and takes as its prototype the deliberate reorganization of industrial work activities to allow computers to track them in real time.

The long article ends with a useful long bibliography (pp. 757-760).

Discussed by Reed Albergotti, "He predicted the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago. Why did no one listen?" The Washington Post on line, Technology section, 12 August 2021. As of November 2021, available on line here (the link URL is quite long; we give also a "Tiny URL" form; both notes go to the article).[2][3]

In 1994 — before most Americans had an email address or Internet access or even a personal computer — Philip Agre foresaw that computers would one day facilitate the mass collection of data on everything in society.

That process would change and simplify human behavior, wrote the then-UCLA humanities professor. And because that data would be collected not by a single, powerful “big brother” government but by lots of entities for lots of different purposes, he predicted that people would willingly part with massive amounts of information about their most personal fears and desires.

More going on in the long article than just considerations of the Internet; see for AI and surveillance, and subtopics such as tracking and facial recognition, and (indeed) data collection. Orwell's Big Brother and Nineteen Eighty-Four — and Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon — are explicitly mentioned.

RDE, finishing, 7Nov21