Ausma Bernot, PhD Candidate, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University

A group of researchers studied 15 months of human mobility movement data taken from 1.5 million people and concluded that just four points in space and time were sufficient to identify 95% of them, even when the data weren’t of excellent quality.

That was back in 2013.

Nearly ten years on, surveillance technologies permeate all aspects of our lives. They collect swathes of data from us in various forms, and often without us knowing.

I’m a surveillance researcher with a focus on technology governance. Here’s my round-up of widespread surveillance systems I think everyone should know about.

CCTV and open-access cameras

Although China has more than 50% of all surveillance cameras installed in the world (about 34 cameras per 1,000 people), Australian cities are catching up. In 2021, Sydney had 4.67 cameras per 1,000 people and Melbourne had 2.13.

While CCTV cameras can be used for legitimate purposes, such as promoting safety in cities and assisting police with criminal investigations, their use also poses serious concerns.

In 2021, New South Wales police were suspected of having used CCTV footage paired with facial recognition to find people attending anti-lockdown protests. When questioned, they didn’t confirm or deny if they had (or if they would in the future).

In August 2022, the United Nations confirmed CCTV is being used to carry out “serious human rights violations” against Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region of Northwest China.

The CCTV cameras in China don’t just record real-time footage. Many are equipped with facial recognition to keep tabs on the movements of minorities. And some have reportedly been trialled to detect emotions.

The US also has a long history of using CCTV cameras to support racist policing practices. In 2021, Amnesty International reported areas with a higher proportion of non-white residents had more CCTV cameras.

Another issue with CCTV is security. Many of these cameras are open-access, which means they don’t have password protection and can often be easily accessed online. So I could spend all day watching a livestream of someone’s porch, as long as there was an open camera nearby.

Surveillance artist Dries Depoorter’s recent project The Follower aptly showcases the vulnerabilities of open cameras. By coupling open camera footage with AI and Instagram photos, Depoorter was able to match people’s photos with the footage of where and when they were taken.

There was pushback, with one of the identified people saying:

It’s a crime to use the image of a person without permission.

Whether or not it is illegal will depend on the specific circumstances and where you live. Either way, the issue here is that Depoorter was able to do this in the first place.

IoT devices

An IoT (“Internet of Things”) device is any device that connects to a wireless network to function – so think smart home devices such as Amazon Echo or Google Dot, a baby monitor, or even smart traffic lights.

It’s estimated global spending on IoT devices will have reached US$1.2 trillion by some point this year. Around 18 billion connected devices form the IoT network. Like unsecured CCTV cameras, IoT devices are easy to hack into if they use default passwords or passwords that have been leaked.

In some examples, hackers have hijacked baby monitor cameras to stalk breastfeeding mums, threaten parents that their baby was being kidnapped, and say creepy things like “I love you” to children.

Beyond hacking, businesses can also use data collected through IoT devices to further target customers with products and services.

Privacy experts raised the alarm in September over Amazon’s merger agreement with robot vacuum company iRobot. A letter to the US Federal Trade Commission signed by 26 civil rights and privacy advocacy groups said:

Linking iRobot devices to the already intrusive Amazon home system incentivizes more data collection from more connected home devices, potentially including private details about our habits and our health that would endanger human rights and safety.

IoT-collected data can also change hands with third parties through data partnerships (which are very common), and this too without customers’ explicit consent.

Big tech and big data

In 2017, the value of big data exceeded that of oil. Private companies have driven the majority of that growth.

For tech platforms, the expansive collection of users’ personal information is business as usual, literally, because more data mean more precise analytics, more effective targeted ads and more revenue.

This logic of profit-making through targeted advertising has been dubbed “surveillance capitalism”. As the old saying goes, if you’re not paying for it, then you’re the product.

Meta (which owns both Facebook and Instagram) generated almost US$23 billion in advertising revenue in the third quarter of this year.

The vast machinery behind this is illustrated well in the 2021 documentary The Social Dilemma, even if in a dramatised way. It showed us how social media platforms rely on our psychological weaknesses to keep us online for as long as possible, measuring our actions down to the seconds we spend hovering over an ad.

Loyalty programs

Although many people don’t realise it, loyalty programs are one of the biggest personal data collection gimmicks out there.

In a particularly intrusive example, in 2012 one US retailer sent a teenage girl a catalogue dotted with pictures of smiling infants and nursery furniture. The girl’s angered father went to confront managers at the local store, and learned that predictive analytics knew more about his daughter than he did.

It’s estimated 88% of Australian consumers over age 16 are members of a loyalty program. These schemes build your consumer profile to sell you more stuff. Some might even charge you sneaky fees and lure you in with future perks to sell you at steep prices.

As technology journalist Ros Page notes:

[T]he data you hand over at the checkout can be shared and sold to businesses you’ve never dealt with.

As a cheeky sidestep, you could find a buddy to swap your loyalty cards with. Predictive analytics is only strong when it can recognise behavioural patterns. When the patterns are disrupted, the data turn into noise.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ausma Bernot, PhD Candidate, Griffith University

By now, most of us are aware social media companies collect vast amounts of our information. By doing this, they can target us with ads and monetise our attention. The latest chapter in the data-privacy debate concerns one of the world’s most popular apps among young people – TikTok.

Yet anecdotally it seems the potential risks aren’t really something young people care about. Some were interviewed by The Project this week regarding the risk of their TikTok data being accessed from China.

They said it wouldn’t stop them using the app. “Everyone at the moment has access to everything,” one person said. Another said they didn’t “have much to hide from the Chinese government”.

Are these fair assessments? Or should Australians actually be worried about yet another social media company taking their data?

What’s happening with TikTok?

In a 2020 Australian parliamentary hearing on foreign interference through social media, TikTok representatives stressed: “TikTok Australia data is stored in the US and Singapore, and the security and privacy of this data are our highest priority.”

But as Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) analyst Fergus Ryan has observed, it’s not about where the data are stored, but who has access.

On June 17, BuzzFeed published a report based on 80 leaked internal TikTok meetings which seemed to confirm access to US TikTok data by Chinese actors. The report refers to multiple examples of data access by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, which is based in China.

Then in July, TikTok Australia’s director of public policy, Brent Thomas, wrote to the shadow minister for cyber security, James Paterson, regarding China’s access to Australian user data.

Thomas denied having been asked for data from China or having “given data to the Chinese government” – but he also noted access is “based on the need to access data”. So there’s good reason to believe Australian users’ data may be accessed from China.

Is TikTok worse than other platforms?

TikTok collects rich consumer information, including personal information and behavioural data from people’s activity on the app. In this respect, it’s not different from other social media companies.

They all need oceans of user data to push ads onto us, and run data analytics behind a shiny facade of cute cats and trendy dances.

However, TikTok’s corporate roots extend to authoritarian China – and not the US, where most of our other social media come from. This carries implications for TikTok users.

Hypothetically, since TikTok moderates content according to Beijing’s foreign policy goals, it’s possible TikTok could apply censorship controls over Australian users.

This means users’ feeds would be filtered to omit anything that doesn’t fit the Chinese government’s agenda, such as support for Taiwan’s sovereignty, as an example. In “shadowbanning”, a user’s posts appear to have been published to the user themselves, but are not visible to anyone else.

It’s worth noting this censorship risk isn’t hypothetical. In 2019, information about Hong Kong protests was reported to have been censored not only on Douyin, China’s domestic version of TikTok, but also on TikTok itself.

Then in 2020, ASPI found hashtags related to LGBTQ+ are suppressed in at least eight languages on TikTok. In response to ASPI’s research, a TikTok spokesperson said the hashtags may be restricted as part of the company’s localisation strategy and due to local laws.

In Thailand, keywords such as #acab, #gayArab and anti-monarchy hashtags were found to be shadowbanned.

Within China, Douyin complies with strict national content regulation. This includes censoring information about the religious movement Falun Gong and the Tiananmen massacre, among other examples.

The legal environment in China forces Chinese internet product and service providers to work with government authorities. If Chinese companies disagree, or are unaware of their obligations, they can be slapped with legal and/or financial penalties and be forcefully shut down.

In 2012, another social media product run by the founder of ByteDance, Yiming Zhang, was forced to close. Zhang fell into political line in a public apology. He acknowledged the platform deviated from “public opinion guidance” by not moderating content that goes against “socialist core values”.

Individual TikTok users should seriously consider leaving the app until issues of global censorship are clearly addressed.

But don’t forget, it’s not just TikTok

Meta products, such as Facebook and Instagram, also measure our interests by the seconds we spend looking at certain posts. They aggregate those behavioural data with our personal information to try to keep us hooked – looking at ads for as long as possible.

Some real cases of targeted advertising on social media have contributed to “digital redlining” – the use of technology to perpetuate social discrimination.

In 2018, Facebook came under fire for showing some employment ads only to men. In 2019, it settled another digital redlining case over discriminatory practices in which housing ads were targeted to certain users on the basis of “race, colour, national origin and religion”.

And in 2021, before the US Capitol breach, military and defence product ads were running alongside conversations about a coup.

Then there are some worst-case scenarios. The 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed how Meta (then Facebook) exposed users’ data to the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica without their consent.

Cambridge Analytica harvested up to 87 million users’ data from Facebook, derived psychological user profiles and used these to tailor pro-Trump messaging to them. This likely had an influence on the 2016 US presidential election.

With TikTok, the most immediate concern for the average Australian user is content censorship – not direct prosecution. But within China, there are recurring instances of Chinese nationals being detained or even jailed for using both Chinese and international social media.

You can see how the consequences of mass data harvesting are not hypothetical. We need to demand more transparency from not just TikTok but all major social platforms regarding how data are used.

Let’s continue the regulation debate TikTok has accelerated. We should look to update privacy protections and embed transparency into Australia’s national regulatory guidelines – for whatever the next big social media app happens to be.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.