Over the next decade, systems which create and store digital records of people’s movements through public space will be woven inextricably into the fabric of everyday life. We are already starting to see such systems now, and there will be many more in the near future.

Here are some examples you might already have used or read about:

• Monthly transit swipe-cards
• Electronic tolling devices (FastTrak, EZpass, congestion pricing)
• Cellphones
• Services telling you when your friends are nearby
• Searches on your PDA for services and businesses near your current location
• Free Wi-Fi with ads for businesses near the network access point you’re using
• Electronic swipe cards for doors
• Parking meters you can call to add money to, and which send you a text message when your time is running out

These systems are marvellously innovative, and they promise benefits ranging from increased convenience to transformative new kinds of social interaction.

Unfortunately, these systems pose a dramatic threat to locational privacy.

And today, the New York Times has an op-ed by Adam Cohen lamenting the threats to locational privacy in our contemporary technological ecosystem:

A little-appreciated downside of the technology revolution is that, mainly without thinking about it, we have given up “locational privacy.” Even in low-tech days, our movements were not entirely private. The desk attendant at my gym might have recalled seeing me, or my colleagues might have remembered when I arrived. Now the information is collected automatically and often stored indefinitely.

It’s good to see this attention to locational privacy, but it’s equally important to recognize that these threats aren’t new: I’ve been blogging and advocating for attention to privacy in public, privacy on the roads, and locational privacy for a number of years now (and I’m certainly not the only one). I’ve also published about particular threats to privacy on the roads (here and here), and tried (with limited success) to engage with designers of new vehicle-technologies to design privacy into the new protocols.

I’m thrilled to see the EFF draw renewed attention to locational privacy. I just hope they’re not too late to start advocating for change…

Google has conceded, and will now erase identifiable raw data depicting people, property, or cars upon request.

This is a first, and it is significant, but it is an exception only for Germany.

Rather than taking a broader value-centered approach to designing its systems, Google continues to base their decisions based (primarily) on local laws. The U.S. lacks laws guaranteeing individuals “privacy in public,” so Google launches street view with minimal (and poorly-executed) ability to protect one’s privacy. Canada, however, does have such laws, so Google decided to blur faces there (but only applies that engineering solution to Canada). Now, Germany wants the source data purged, so Google will only provide this privacy-protecting measure to that local authority.

A broader values-centered approach would (learning from the Canadian and EU legal environment) recognize that protecting one’s privacy in public might indeed be a fundamental right, and perhaps is something that must be designed into such a potentially privacy-invasive tool as Street View.

I’ve informally chatted with Google folks about these issues, and I applaud that they do have law/policy folks on every product team. But too often, when asked about something like “why didn’t you blur the faces in the U.S. version”, the answer is “the law doesn’t require it”. Such a strict legal approach to designing (or not) ethics into products is extremely shortsighted.

Do we need to start calling for Chief Ethical Officers in our corporations?

Most recently, Germany has noted that Google’s (reluctant) blurring of faces and license plates is not enough, demanding that the original images themselves be permanently removed from their databases. Google argues that the original images are necessary to help the system “learn” how to automatically blur better in the future. This sounds like a valid need from an engineering perspective, but the key dilemma here is how to manage the balance between engineering and ethics. Just because the engineers want to have access to the original images doesn’t mean they should remain.

These are difficult decisions to make, but we’re here to help…

Meanwhile, I’ll take this opportunity to reiterate what I’ve previously suggested Google do to alleviate some of the privacy concerns with Street View:

1. Make use of their own facial recognition technology to automatically scan the Street View image database to identify and blur all faces, thereby protecting privacy and differentiating themselves from Microsoft’s offering. This should be done in all Street View products, not just the Canadian version.
2. Make reporting inappropriate images easier by placing a specific  “report this image” link on each image screen, not just a generic “help” link.
3. Think harder about privacy in public, and recognize that just because a random person can take another random person’s picture in public doesn’t mean there’s no difference in having a similar image available on Google.

When a 911 call is received, the CAD system scans the OVS network to find any safety camera within 150 feet of the address of the call.

Within seconds, real time video of the location appears on the call taker’s screen.

This story in the NY Times notes the typical privacy concerns with this kind of public surveillance infrastructure:

[O]pponents of Mr. Daley’s use of public surveillance cameras described the new system as a potential Big Brother intrusion on privacy rights.

“If a 911 caller reports that someone left a backpack on the sidewalk, will the camera image of someone who appears to be of Arab or South Asian descent make police decide that person is suspicious?” asked Ed Yohnka of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

“There seems to be this incredibly voracious appetite on the part of the city to link up cameras to the 911 system,” Mr. Yohnka said. “But there are just no longitudinal statistics that prove that surveillance cameras reduce crime. They just displace crime.”

Nothing too surprising in the discourse surrounding this system, except for this quote in the Times article:

Some experts, including Albert Alschuler, a law professor at Northwestern University, say the surveillance cameras and updated 911 system do not violate privacy rights because the cameras are installed in public locations.

Huh? I’m not familiar with Prof. Alschuler’s work, or what kind of “expert” he is, but I’m quite surprised that he would take such a binary approach to privacy, and not recognize that a right to privacy in public often exists (within social and contextual norms, if not the law).

Wyatt Ditzler, one of our PhD students, provides further comments on this story, noting a concern over who has access to the system and the retention policies of the video captured. Ditzler also provides a “slight joke,” suggesting that “Perhaps video surveillance, open to the public, covering all governmental offices is in order.” Many have actually called for this form mutual surveillance and full disclosure to everyone, such as in Brin’s Transparent Society. The problem with this vision of society, as Bruce Schneier has pointed out, is that it fails to account for dissimilarities in power relations. Law enforcement can do a lot more to affect my life if they know all my secrets, than I can do to affect theirs.

Google released Street View to much criticism, given the prevalence of visible and identifiable faces and license plates captured by their fleet of camera-toting cars trolling our streets. To remove yourself from the service, Google first required submission of your legal name, e-mail address, a copy of your driver’s license or other government ID, and proof of your association with that address (letterhead, utility bill, etc). This, of course, created even more privacy concerns, and Google eventually backed down on this set of requirements, instead asking for only your name and the image location.

Later, Google loosened the requirements further, allowing anyone to request the blurring of a face or license place, even if the identifiable image isn’t you/yours. And now it seems certain version of Street View will automatically have all faces and license plates automatically blurred.

These are all positive moves by Google, but they are all reactionary. They reveal Google’s adeptness of responding to criticism over user privacy, and little initiative in proactively protecting that privacy with these kinds of products.

This isn’t much of a surprise given Google’s apparent position that since people are in public, they have no right to privacy. Consider the comments by Philipp Schindler, head of Google Northern Europe, that appeared in the German Spiegel Online (as translated by Philipp Lenssen):

The Street View feature includes only those photos taken from public grounds. The imagery is not different from anything each of us can photograph themselves – the kinds of things you’d see when you walk the streets.

Such a sentiment has no understanding of the “contextual integrity” of one’s privacy in public. Yes, someone might happen to be standing on the same street corner at the exact date and time that I am walking by and take my picture. But that is one person who was lucky enough to have good timing, and one photo in that person’s camera. Most people expect a handful of strangers to be able to view, and perhaps take note, of one’s public actions. But it is a difference in kind when those actions are digitally recorded, indexed, and viewable by millions through the world’s leading provider of information.

Further, consider the justification provided by Peter Fleischer, Google’s Senior Privacy Counsel, from this article:

The United States has “a long tradition of saying that it is legal and appropriate to take pictures from public spaces and publish them,” Mr. Fleischer said.

I am uncertain as to his claim that the U.S. (courts, presumably) have a “long tradition” supporting the “appropriateness” of publishing images from public places. Any discussion of appropriateness would certainly be contextually bound, and shouldn’t be considered a blank check to publish any and all public images online. Even so, the fact that U.S. courts say its OK doesn’t mean Google should do it. (“Don’t be…”)

Google really missed the boat on this one. Remember, Microsoft had already released a similar product with the same privacy concerns (although few noted it at the time), and to really take a leadership role in protecting user privacy, Google could have done the following:

1. Make use of their own facial recognition technology to automatically scan the Street View image database to identify and blur all faces, thereby protecting privacy and differentiating themselves from Microsoft’s offering. This should be done in all Street View products, not just the Canadian version.
2. Make reporting inappropriate images easier by placing a specific  “report this image” link on each image screen, not just a generic “help” link.
3. Think harder about privacy in public, and recognize that just because a random person can take another random person’s picture in public doesn’t mean there’s no difference in having a similar image available on Google.

Of course, its not too late to make these changes…

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I don’t want to be picky, but given all the (necessary) attention given to the privacy aspects of Street View, I still wonder where everyone was when Microsoft launched basically the same service last year. As I pointed out then, the same privacy and surveillance concerns emerge. Is Microsoft truly that irrelevant now that we’re no longer concerned about their ability to surveil and collect personal information?

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Business Week has a short profile of the company who has an exclusive agreement with Google to provide the imaging. The story includes some details of the 11-lens camera, called a Dodeca 2360, used to provide the Street View images. They note: “What makes it unique is its dodecahedron (12-sided) shape, which captures images consistently in every direction. Anyone can buy one for around $100,000, but only a handful have been sold—mostly to government agencies.” So, Google and government agencies are the only one’s who have access to this imaging technology…lovely…

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It has been reported that in order to have your image removed from Street View, you must provide Google your legal name, e-mail address, URL of the Street View image, a copy of your driver’s license or other government ID, and proof of your association with that address (letterhead, utility bill, etc). Of course, many consider providing this level of detailed information to Google just as harmful as the Street View image itself, especially since there doesn’t seem to be a privacy policy in place regarding their handling of this extraneous personal data.

Google eventually backed down on this set of requirements, instead asking for only your name and the image location. While some herald this as Google taking action about privacy concerns, it seems more like a poorly-thought-out knee-jerk reaction to an original poorly-thought-out policy. Given this thin requirement, little prevents me from requesting to have images removed of anyone I feel like (competitors, friends, etc). If Google really wanted to take action to help protect people’s privacy in public, they would add a link to “remove your image” on the Street View main interface, rather than hiding it 2 clicks away on a help page.

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Philipp Lenssen provides a translation of an interview with Head of Google Northern Europe Philipp Schindler that appeared in the German Spiegel Online, where Schnidler responds to some of the privacy concerns:

The Street View feature includes only those photos taken from public grounds. The imagery is not different from anything each of us can photograph themselves – the kinds of things you’d see when you walk the streets. Added to that, we spoke to a variety of US organizations to get a feeling if there’s potential concerns, and if so, which these are. In the cases where we found out it’s necessary to introduce special privacy protections, we reacted prior to launch. For instance, you won’t find images of accommodations for the homeless, or abortion clinics.

Those familiar with my research can predict my objections with the implicit claim that images taken in public places are unproblematic. But what bugs me about Schindler’s comment is the odd assumption that removing images of homeless shelters somehow protects the privacy of those individuals, along with his claim that abortion clinics have been scrubbed as well. I found this image of a Planned Parenthood clinic in lower Manhattan the first day this was launched!

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Finally, odd scenarios continue to be found within Street View, including this sequence of a violent street fight captured for posterity as the van passed by.

Google has now jumped into the foray, offering their own “Street View” enhancement for Google Maps. Pretty slick, but the same concerns persist. If you click on the image to the right, you’ll find the “street view”for a Planned Parenthood clinic in lower Manhattan. Do you think those people hanging out in front expected their image to be taken and mapped by Google for millions to see? Luckily for them, they’re not identifiable in this particular case, but I’m sure other examples could be found that might show people in places they’d rather not have recorded and distributed by Google.

But wait! Perhaps Google was listening, for they provide instructions for flagging a “Street View” image as “inappropriate” which takes users to a feedback page where particular images can be flagged with these concerns:

• This image contains inappropriate content
• This image infringes on my privacy
• This image presents personal security concerns
• Other

What Google does with these requests I don’t know, but its a helpful step for them to acknowledge that these concerns persist with the expanded use of images from everyday life in such applications.

One suggestion, though: the “report inappropriate image” prompt should be on the main image display, not tucked away at the bottom of the related “help” page.

UPDATE: BoingBoing readers have been sending in various “inappropriate” images viewable thanks to Google’s new toy, including this one of someone’s neighbor taking out their trash (are they recycling??), and another of a car in a driveway with its license plate in clear view (I hope its supposed to be there).

UPDATE 2: Wired News is amassing a nice collection of images as well.

UPDATE 3: More amazing “best of photo galleries” [via Google Blogoscoped]

This post is an attempt to collect and organize some thoughts on how the rise of so-called Web 2.0 technologies bear on privacy and surveillance studies. After presenting a few examples of unintended consequences of Web 2.0 that bear on privacy and surveillance, I will introduce the term “netaveillance,” which might provide a useful concept around which a more robust theory of surveillance about the Web 2.0 phenomena might be built.

The rhetoric surrounding the Web 2.0 movement presents certain cultural claims about media, identity, and technology. It suggests that everyone can and should use new Internet technologies to organize and share information, to interact within communities, and to express oneself. It promises to empower creativity, to democratize media production, and to celebrate the individual while also relishing the power of collaboration and social networks. Websites such as Flickr, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, MySpace, and YouTube are all part of this apparent second-generation Internet phenomenon, which has spurred a variety of new services and communities – and venture capitalist dollars.

This cartoon of a room full of people arguing at a cocktail party after someone mentioned the provocative theories of Marshall McLuhan reminds me of today’s emotional debates over the relative impact – and even the very existence – of Web 2.0. Many hail Web 2.0 as the “new wisdom of the web,” and “a new cultural force based on mass collaboration,” while others deride it as merely a marketing jingo, “amoral,” and even an extension of Marxist ideology.

This last notion, the relationship between Web 2.0 and Marxism, was suggested by Andrew Keen, one of the loudest provocateurs of the Web 2.0 ideology. Keen has received considerable criticism for making comparisons between the Web 2.0 meme and Marxism, but, between the vitriol, he does make some valid points about the utopianism and solipsism that seems to underlie much of the Web 2.0 discourse. In particular, he criticizes the fervent commitment to technological progress:

The ideology of the Web 2.0 movement was perfectly summarized at the Technology Education and Design (TED) show in Monterey, last year, when Kevin Kelly, Silicon Valley’s über-idealist and author of the Web 1.0 Internet utopia Ten Rules for The New Economy, said:“Imagine Mozart before the technology of the piano. Imagine Van Gogh before the technology of affordable oil paints. Imagine Hitchcock before the technology of film. We have a moral obligation to develop technology.”

But where Kelly sees a moral obligation to develop technology, we should actually have–if we really care about Mozart, Van Gogh and Hitchcock–a moral obligation to question the development of technology. [emphasis added]

This moral obligation to question the development of technology compels Keen to identify some of the unintended consequences of the emergence of Web 2.0 infrastructures, including the flattening of culture, the overabundance of amateur authors and producers, and narcissism run wild.

As I begin to study the Web 2.0 meme from the perspective of privacy and surveillance theory, a different set of unintended consequences emerges, including shifts in the flow of personal information that might threaten personal privacy in ways much more damaging than Keen’s concern that content is now made and distributed by mere amateurs instead of honed professionals.

For example, Web 2.0 applications often rely on rich metadata to create value in information, such as the geotagging of images uploaded to Flickr. While it might be useful and fun to have locational data automatically associated with your images, considerable privacy concerns emerge as an externality. For instance, law enforcement officials can simply search for all photos online matching the location & timing of a certain political rally in order to broaden their ability to keep records of who was present. Or, combined with the development of facial recognition technologies with shared online photos, stalkers (or other annoying folks) might soon be able to search for a certain person’s face, and discover the GPS coordinates of the coffee shop they seem to be pictured in every Tuesday morning. Someone even developed a tool, FlickerInspector, to facilitate this kind of mining of the datastreams users leave behind on Flickr.

Of course, one doesn’t need a fancy application like FlickerInspector to reap the benefits of the new datastreams facilitated by Web 2.0 applications. Inherent in Web 2.0 evangelism is an overall faith in the network to be the processing platform: users are encouraged to put as much of their lives as possible online, to divulge and share their personal lives, their professional development, their favorite websites, their music, their friendships, their appointments, and even where they’ve connected to wi-fi. If you know a person’s “handle” on one Web 2.0 site (“michaelzimmer” at del.icio.us), you probably can find them on many more (Plazes, LibraryThing).

The prevalence of sharing so many details of one’s life through various Web 2.0 and social networking sites, and the relative ease of finding users across these services, leads to a second key externality: the rise of amateur data-mining. Fueled by the power and reach of Web search engines, it seems anyone can now engage in the kind of tracking and data-mining of user’s online activities that was once possibly only by the most powerful of computer systems.

An interesting case of amateur data mining made possible through Web 2.0 involves “Don, the camera thief.” The blog BoingBoing posted a story of a woman who lost her camera while on vacation, but was contacted by the family who happened to find it. Unfortunately – and oddly – the family who found it refused to return the camera because their child liked it so much. BoingBoing thought the actions by the finders of the camera were “shameful.” A few days after posting this, BoingBoing received an e-mail from someone who claimed his name was “Don Deveny,” purportedly a Canadian lawyer, who implied that the post was illegal and that BoingBoing was liable for making it. The folks at BoingBoing doubted the legitimacy of the email (the word “lawyer” was misspelled, for example), and decided to see what he could find out about “Don.”

They first contacted many of the law societies in Canada, none of whom had any record of a “Don Deveny” licensed to practice law in Canada. (by the way, it is illegal to pretend to be a lawyer). From their e-mail exchange, they were able to isolate the writer’s real e-mail address from the message headers, and through a Google search, located other pages that contain that address. That led them to a profile page for a user of the website called “Canada Kick A**” who shared the very same e-mail address. That profile page had a different person’s name (perhaps “Don’s” real name?), and also listed a location and profession for the user (he’s not a lawyer). It didn’t take much to figure out (or at least get a better clue) as to who this e-mailer was, and his profile page on a Web 2.0-inspired discussion board made it much easier.

Readers of BoingBoing did some amateur data mining of their own: a commenter at the original camera owner’s blog seemed to share many of the same sentiments of “Don,” along with many of the same spelling errors. This commenter used a different screen name, but when asked to identify himself, also said he was a lawyer. Another reader then discovered that a user with that same screen name recently bid on memory cards at eBay that would have been used in the stolen camera. More amateur data mining ensued, and discovered another user profile at a different discussion forum with the same user name and same “favorite sites” listed in the signature file. And this page included a photo of the user: Is this “Don” our camera thief?

Another example of the ease of amateur data mining with the help of Web 2.0 services is the outing of Lonelygirl15. Lonelygirl15 was the mysterious girl leaving video confessions on YouTube, garnering a huge following of devoted fans, yet know one knew who she was or if they were really just a kid’s video diary or perhaps a large hoax or advertising campaign. After some amateur data mining, the truth came out:
A reader was surfing an article on Lonelygirl15 at a random website when he came across a comment that linked to a private MySpace page that was allegedly that of the actress who plays Lonelygirl15. Since the profile was set to “private,” very little information one could glean from the page. However, when he queried Google for that particular MySpace user name, “jeessss426,” he was able to access Google’s cache from the page a few months ago when it was still public. A lot of the details of the girl’s background quickly emerged: She was an actress from a small city in New Zealand who had moved to Burbank recently to act. The name on the profile was “Jessica Rose.” When he happened to query Google image search for “Jessica Rose New Zealand” he was instantly rewarded with two cached thumbnail photos of Lonelygirl15, a.k.a. Jessica Rose, from a New Zealand talent agency that had since removed the full size versions. A search on Yahoo for “jeessss426” also turned up various pictures from her (probably forgotten) ImageShack photo sharing account. Lonelygirl15 was revealed.

Little effort was needed to link up the various e-mails, user names, personal data flows, and photos shared across blogs, discussion forums and other Web 2.0-style sites to track down “Don the camera thief” or “LoneyGirl15”. Moving more and more of our activities to Web 2.0 makes it harder to remain anonymous, and the myth of “security through obscurity” seems to be disappearing as various crumbs of our true identity are being scattered across the Web 2.0 landscape.

A final externality of Web 2.0 relates to a new form of informational voyeurism that these platforms enable. While Web 2.0 sites have enjoyed incredible growth and heavy viral participation, only a small fraction of overall users actually use the services to upload content – the vast majority just likes to lurk and watch. According to one report, only 0.16 percent of YouTube’s total traffic is made up of users who upload videos. Similarly, only 0.2 percent of Flickr’s regular users are there to upload photos. And slick new tools emerge daily to facilitate the surveillance and voyeurism of people’s daily activities. For example, “feeds” on Facebook allow users to be notified immediately when a friend updates their profile (changing their mood, their friend list, their relationship status, etc), dodgeball helps users find friends (and unknown friends of friends) within a 10 block radius of their present location, DiggSpy allows real-time monitoring of user’s activities on the popular news ranking site Digg, and Twitter has quickly emerged as the hottest new voyeuristic service, allowing users to share text snippets of their day-to-day activities, and monitor others’ streams of the mundane details of their lives (such as “a whole gang of women with dogs just walked past my window”).

What seems to be emerging is a new form of voyeuristic surveillance of people’s everyday lives, fueled by Web 2.0. This has been referred to varyingly as “peer-to-peer surveillance” or even as a new kind of “participatory panopticon.” Yet these terms – and the theories embedded within them – seem insufficient to fully grasp the significance of the emergence of this new voyeurism of the mundane. Surveillance, of course, implies the “watching over” of subjects from above, with an explicit power relationship between the watchers and those placed under its gaze. Trying to describe surveillance as “peer-to-peer” suggests a flattening of the power relationship that is counter to its very definition. Similarly, the notion of a “participatory panopticon” is at the same time redundant and contradictory. Foucault revealed how panoptic power becomes internalized by the subjects, thus, they necessarily “participate” in their own subjugation. Yet the top-down power relationship within the panoptic structure remains. The participation by the subjects does not make them equal with the watchers. Yet the informational voyeurism associated with Web 2.0 seems to imply a balance between the users: one shares their data streams in order to improve the overall worth of the network, coupled with the presumption that they’ll be able to observe and leverage others’ streams as well.

This notion resembles that of “equiveillance,” a state of equilibrium between the top-down power of surveillance, and the resistant bottom-up watching of sousveillance. Yet, this notion implies merely a balance in access to surveillance information, and is focused more on how to reach some kind of harmonious relationship with our rising surveillance society. With the informational voyeurism of Web 2.0, however, the goal isn’t to resist or come to terms with the power yielded by traditional surveillance, but rather to participate in a widespread and open sharing of the mundane details of one’s daily life. To give one’s peers a glimpse into one’s own personal universe.

These snapshots of the minutia of people’s lives have been compared to the Japanese concept of “neta”, the tidbits of people’s lives that are shared with family and friends as a kind of social currency. The Japan Media Review (an affiliate of Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review) recently made an insightful connection between “neta” and Web 2.0 voyeurism:

In Japanese, “material” for news and stories is called “neta.” The term has strong journalistic associations, but also gets used to describe material that can become the topic of conversation among friends or family: a new store seen on the way to work; a cousin who just dropped out of high school; a funny story heard on the radio. Camera phones provide a new tool for making these everyday neta not just verbally but also visually shareable.

As the mundane is elevated to a photographic object, the everyday is now the site of potential news and visual archiving. Sending camera-phone photos to major news outlets and moblogging are one end of a broad spectrum of everyday and mass photojournalism using camera phones. What counts as newsworthy, noteworthy and photo-worthy spans a broad spectrum from personally noteworthy moments that are never shared (a scene from an escalator) to intimately newsworthy moments to be shared with a spouse or lover (a new haircut, a child riding a bike). It also includes neta to be shared among family or peers (a friend captured in an embarrassing moment, a cute pet shot) and microcontent uploaded to blogs and online journals. The transformation of journalism through camera phones is as much about these everyday exchanges as it is about the latest headline.

Building on this Japanese concept of “neta,” I propose a new kind of “veillance” has emerged with Web 2.0 infrastructures: “netaveillance”. Netaveillance can be defined as the process of openly and purposefully providing an almost continual stream of the details of one’s daily life – the mundane, the profane, and the vain – through Web-based technologies, coupled with the ability to capture similar data streams from one’s peers. Netaveillance constitutes an emerging ecosystem of personal data flows – not the exceptional information meant to be protected from state or commercial surveillance, but the free and open sharing of the minutiae of our lives.

My conceptualization of netaveillance is, to be sure, in its most nascent of stages. Much work needs to be done to contemplate how it relates to existing theories of privacy and surveillance, how power relations between and among participants might still exist, how such data flows could be captured by state or commercial interests, and so on. Theorizing and understanding netaveillance is no small task, but it might provide a new language and framework from which to understand the informational voyeurism and related unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

Whether you want to bring it up at a cocktail party is up to you.

Hey you, the scofflaw parked illegally in the handicapped spot. Smile! You’re in cyberspace. And that goes for all you other wrongdoers out there: the jerk parked in a bike lane, the flasher on the metro, the negligent nanny, the litterbug, the loud-mouth cellphone user and the reckless driver.

It’s time for your close-up.

Public shaming isn’t just for celebrities any more, thanks to a new crop of websites that expose those who commit crimes and misdemeanours that often used to go unpunished.

Cellphone cameras and the World Wide Web have ushered in a new era of cyber-vigilantism in which offenders risk instant, global notoriety.

Some of the websites discussed in the article include hollabacknyc.blogspot.com (empowering New Yorkers to post images of street harassers), isawyournanny.blogspot.com (where people can report on poor babysitting practices witnessed in public), and www.youparklikeanasshole.com (various photos of cars parked by, well, assholes).

While these sites of Internet vigilantism can be empowering to victims of wrongdoing and might shame others to change their actions, they also point to a growing trend of the erosion of privacy in public. My contribution to the article summarizes this concern:

The risk of reprisals by enraged victims is one of several aspects of the trend that concern Michael Zimmer, a doctoral candidate in the department of culture and communications at New York University.

“I call it peer-to-peer surveillance,” said Zimmer, who writes a blog, michaelzimmer.org, on how technology, values, privacy and surveillance intersect.

“It chips away at our previous conception of privacy” by broadcasting private individuals’ worst traits to a global audience, Zimmer said.

“If I start ranting at someone and someone posts it to show how much of an idiot I am, now there’s 10 million people who know I’m a jerk. Potential employers know I’m a jerk.”

Various links to related posts below…

Four years ago, at the request of the city, the same judge, Charles S. Haight Jr., gave the police greater authority to investigate political, social and religious groups.

In yesterday’s ruling, Judge Haight, of United States District Court in Manhattan, found that by videotaping people who were exercising their right to free speech and breaking no laws, the Police Department had ignored the milder limits he had imposed on it in 2003.

Citing two events in 2005 — a march in Harlem and a demonstration by homeless people in front of the home of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — the judge said the city had offered scant justification for videotaping the people involved.

“There was no reason to suspect or anticipate that unlawful or terrorist activity might occur,” he wrote, “or that pertinent information about or evidence of such activity might be obtained by filming the earnest faces of those concerned citizens and the signs by which they hoped to convey their message to a public official.”

While he called the police conduct “egregious,” Judge Haight also offered an unusual judicial mea culpa, taking responsibility for his own words in a 2003 order that he conceded had not been “a model of clarity.”

A win for the preservation of “privacy in public,” but this also shows how important is it to ensure such rights are made explicit, and not left to be interpreted by those who hold the power of surveillance.