Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Kate Crawford has recently suggested that the everyday lived experience of big data is one of “surveillant anxiety”: the fear that the personal information that individuals disclose about themselves and that others generate about them is intercepted and analyzed by the intelligence services within emergent praxes of pervasive dataveillance. I empirically assess this notion of “surveillant anxiety” in the context of spatial big data. Drawing on the results of a small-scale survey of understandings of location data collection and dissemination via mobile devices and their contextualization against other available data, I demonstrate that individuals are seemingly more concerned with transparency in data collection and in controlling flows of personal spatial information about themselves than they are with practices of data capture or their eventual use(s). Rather than a generalizable societal condition of “surveillant anxiety,” I argue that the realities of living in a (spatial) big data present are better characterized in terms of what I designate as “anxieties of control”: the desire to discern (be aware of) and direct (determine the disclosure of) personal spatial big data flows about oneself while feeling that any attempt at exerting such control is effectively futile.

Keywords

Big data location surveillance anxiety control

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Allan A and Warden P (2011) Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves. O’Reilly Radar, 20 April. Available at: http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/04/apple-location-tracking.html (accessed 1 June 2011).

Amin

Thrift

(2002) Cities: Reimagining the Urban, Cambridge, Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Ball J (2014) NSA and GCHQ target ‘leaky’ phone apps like Angry Birds to scoop user data. The Guardian, 27 January. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/27/nsa-gchq-smartphone-app-angry-birds-personal-data (accessed 28 January 2014).

Bauman

Lyon

(2013) Liquid Surveillance, Cambridge, Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Blumberg AJ and Eckersley P (2009) On locational privacy, and how to avoid losing it forever. Electronic Frontier Foundation. Available at: http://www.eff.org/wp/locational-privacy (accessed 1 July 2010).

boyd

(2014) It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, New Haven, London: Yale University Press.

boyd

Crawford

(2012) Critical questions for big data. Information, Communication & Society 15: 662–679.

Brown I (2013) Future identities: Changing identities in the UK—The next 10 years | DR 5: How will surveillance and privacy technologies impact on the psychological notions of identity?. Government Office for Science. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/275755/13-507-surveillance-and-privacy-technologies-impact-on-identity.pdf.

Cheng J (2010) More privacy headaches for Facebook: Gay users outed to advertisers. Ars Technica, 21 October. Available at: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/10/more-privacy-headaches-for-facebook-gay-users-outed-to-advertisers/ (accessed 22 October 2010).

10.

Clarke

(1988) Information technology and dataveillance. Communications of the ACM 31: 498–512.

11.

Cohen

(2012) Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code and the Play of Everyday Practice, New Haven: Yale University Press.

12.

Couldry

Powell

(2014) Big data from the bottom up. Big Data & Society. July–December 2014: 1–5. DOI: 10.1177/2053951714539277.

13.

Crampton

(2014) Collect it all: National security, big data and governance. GeoJournal. Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1007/s10708-014-9598-y.

14.

Crawford K (2014) The anxieties of big data. The New Inquiry, 30 May. Available at: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-anxieties-of-big-data/ (accessed 11 June 2014).

15.

Crawford

Schultz

(2014) Big data and due process: Toward a framework to redress predictive privacy harms. Boston College Law Review 55: 93–128.

16.

Cvrcek D, Kumpost M, Matyas V, et al. (2006) A study on the value of location privacy. Paper presented at the 2006 ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES '06), 30 October, Alexandria, VA. Available at: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1179621 (accessed 15 July 2015).

17.

de Montjoye

Y-A

Hidalgo

Verleysen

(2013) Unique in the crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility. Scientific Reports 3: 1–5.

18.

Elwood

Leszczynski

(2011) Privacy, reconsidered: New representations, data practices, and the geoweb. Geoforum 42: 6–15.

19.

Gallagher R and Greenwald G (2015) Canada casts global surveillance dragnet over file downloads. The Intercept, 28 January. Available at: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/28/canada-cse-levitation-mass-surveillance (accessed 13 February 2015).

20.

Glanz J, Larson J and Lehren AW (2014) Spy agencies tap data streaming from phone apps. The New York Times, 27 January. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/world/spy-agencies-scour-phone-apps-for-personal-data.html?_r=0 (accessed 28 January 2014).

21.

Graham M and Shaw J (2015) Code, content, and control: Global geographies of digital participation and representation. Paper presented at The 7th Doreen Massey Annual Event (DM7), 24 March, Open University, Milton Keynes.

22.

Haggerty

Ericson

(2000) The surveillant assemblage. British Journal of Sociology 54: 605–622.

23.

Hansen

(2012) Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media, New York and London: Routledge.

24.

Hern A (2014) What is Apple’s iBeacon? The Guardian, 13 January. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/13/what-is-apple-ibeacon-retail-tracking (accessed 16 January 2014).

25.

Heuer S and Tranberg P (2014) These companies are fighting for your right to privacy online. The Daily Dot, 09 June. Available at: http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/big-data-mining-privacy-sustainability/.

26.

Hildebrandt J, Pereira M and Seglins D (2015) CSE tracks millions of downloads daily: Snowden documents. CBC News, 27 January. Available at: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cse-tracks-millions-of-downloads-daily-snowden-documents-1.2930120 (accessed 13 February 2015).

27.

Kitchin R (2014b) Continuous geosurveillance in the ‘Smart City’. DIS Magazine, February. Available at: http://dismagazine.com/issues/73066/rob-kitchin-spatial-big-data-and-geosurveillance/ (accessed 21 February 2015).

28.

Kitchin

(2014b) The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Singapore: SAGE.

29.

Kitchin

Lauriault

(2014) Towards critical data studies: Charting and unpacking data assemblages and their work. In: Eckert

Shears

Thatcher

(eds) The Geoweb and Big Data, Omaha: University of Nebraska Press.

30.

Klauser

Albrechtslund

(2014) From self-tracking to smart urban infrastructures: Towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on Big Data. Surveillance & Society 12: 273–286.

31.

Kleinman Z (2015) Battery power alone can be used to track Android phones. BBC News Technology, 23 February. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31587621 (accessed 24 February 2015).

32.

Lin J, Amini S, Hong JI, et al. (2012) Expectation and purpose: Understanding users’ mental models of mobile app privacy through crowdsourcing. Paper presented at the 14th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2012), 5–8 September, Pittsburgh, PA. Available at: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2370290 (accessed 15 July 2015).

33.

Lyon

(2014) Surveillance, Snowden, and big data: Capabities, consequences, critique. Big Data & Society 1: 1–13.

34.

Madden M, Lenhart A, Contesi S, et al. (2013) Teens and Mobile Apps Privacy. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Available at: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Teens-and-Mobile-Apps-Privacy.aspx.

35.

Marwick

(2013a) Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age, New Haven: Yale University Press.

36.

Marwick AE (2013b) Networked privacy & social surveillance. Paper presented as part of the Surveillance Studies Centre Seminar Series, 20 November, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada.

37.

Marwick

boyd

(2011) I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society 13: 96–113.

38.

Marwick

boyd

(2014) Networked privacy: How teenagers negotiate context in social media. New Media & Society 16: 14051–1067.

39.

McFarland M (2014) How iBeacons could change the world forever. The Washington Post, 07 January. Available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/01/07/how-ibeacons-could-change-the-world-forever/ (accessed 16 January 2014).

40.

Microsoft (2011) Location-based services usage & perceptions survey. Available at: http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=3250 (accessed 3 March 2013).

41.

Nissenbaum

(2010) Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, Palo Alto: Stanford Law Books.

42.

Ricker

Schuurman

Kellser

(2014) Implications of smartphone usage on privacy and spatial congition: Academic literature and public perceptions. GeoJournal. Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1007/s10708-014-9568-4.

43.

Sass E (2010) You can check in, but you can’t check out: Users worried by location apps. The Social Graf, 19 July. Available at: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/index.cfm?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=132210 (accessed 19 August 2011).

44.

Scahill

Begley

(2015) The CIA campaign to steal Apple’s secrets. The Intercept, 10 March. Available at: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/10/ispy-cia-campaign-steal-apples-secrets/ (accessed 11 February 2014).

45.

Shelton M, Rainie L, Madden M, et al. (2015) Americans’ Privacy Strategies Post-Snowden. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/03/16/americans-privacy-strategies-post-snowden/ (accessed 15 July 2015).

46.

Shklovski I, Mainwaring SD, Skúladóttir HH, et al. (2014) Leakiness and creepiness in App Space: Perceptions of privacy and mobile app use. Paper presented at the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14), 26 April–01 May, Toronto. Available at: http://scott.mainzone.com/pubs/14-leakiness-creepiness.pdf (accessed 15 July 2015).

47.

Silverman J (2015) Big data’s big libertarian lie: Facebook, Google and the Silicon Valley ethical overhaul we need. Salon, 26 April. Available at: http://www.salon.com/2015/04/26/big_datas_big_libertarian_lie_facebook_google_and_the_silicon_valley_ethical_overhaul_we_need/ (accessed 30 April 2105).

48.

Solove

(2006) A taxonomy of privacy. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 154: 477–460.

49.

Soltani A and Gellman B (2013a) New documents show how the NSA infers relationships based on mobile location data. The Switch, 10 December. Available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/10/new-documents-show-how-the-nsa-infers-relationships-based-on-mobile-location-data/ (accessed 11 December 2013).

50.

Soltani A and Gellman B (2013b) NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show. The Washington Post, 04 December. Available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tracking-cellphone-locations-worldwide-snowden-documents-show/2013/12/04/5492873a-5cf2-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html (accessed 6 December 2013).

51.

Soltani A, Paterson A and Gellman B (2013) NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking. The Switch, 10 December. Available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/10/nsa-uses-google-cookies-to-pinpoint-targets-for-hacking/ (accessed 4 January 2014).

52.

Staiano J, Oliver N, Lepri B, et al. (2014) Money walks: A human-centric study on the economics of personal mobile data. Paper to be presented at the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2014), 13–17 September, Seattle, WA. Availbale at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.0566.

53.

Taylor

Lindley

Regan

(2014) Data and life on the street. Big Data & Society 1: 1–7.

54.

Thatcher

(2014) Living on fumes: Digital footprints, data fumes, and the limitations of spatial big data. International Journal of Communication 8: 1765–1783.

55.

The White House (2014a) Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values. Washington, DC: The White House. Available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/technology/big-data-review (accessed 4 May 2014).

56.

The White House (2014b) The Big Data and Privacy Review. Washington, DC: The White House. Available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/technology/big-data-review (accessed 5 May 2014).

57.

TRUSTe Inc. (2013) UK consumer data privacy study—Mobile edition. Available at: http://www.truste.com/uk-mobile-privacy-index-2013/ (accessed 2 July 2014).

58.

Weston G, Greenwald G and Gallagher R (2014) CSEC used airport Wi-Fi to track Canadian travellers: Edward Snowden documents. CBC News, 30 January. Available at: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/csec-used-airport-wi-fi-to-track-canadian-travellers-edward-snowden-documents-1.2517881 (accessed 31 January 2014).

59.

Yadron D (2014) Angrier Birds: NSA turns to app data to track targets. Digits, 27 January. Available at: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/01/27/angrier-birds-nsa-turns-to-app-data-to-track-targets/?mg=blogs-wsj&url=http%253A%252F%252Fblogs.wsj.com%252Fdigits%252F2014%252F01%252F27%252Fangrier-birds-nsa-turns-to-app-data-to-track-targets (accessed 28 January 2014).

60.

Zickuhr K (2013) Location-Based Services. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Available at: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Location.aspx (accessed 21 September 2013).

61.

Zickuhr K and Smith A (2010) Check-In Apps: The Results. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Available at: http://www.utest.com/bugbattle/q210/results (accessed 19 June 2010).

Spatial big data and anxieties of control

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References