Digital Vigilantism as Weaponisation of Visibility

This paper considers an emerging practice whereby citizen’s use of ubiquitous and domesticated technologies enable a parallel form of criminal justice. Here, weaponised visibility supersedes police intervention as an appropriate response. Digital vigilantism is a user-led violation of privacy that not only transcends online/offline distinctions but also complicates relations of visibility and control between police and the public. This paper develops a theoretically nuanced and empirically grounded understanding of digital vigilantism in order to advance a research agenda in this area of study. In addition to literature on vigilantism and citizen-led violence, this paper draws from key works in surveillance (Haggerty and Ericsson, British Journal of Sociology, 51, 605–622, 2000) as well as visibility studies (Brighenti 2007; Goldsmith, British Journal of Criminology, 50(5), 914–934, 2010) in order to situate how digital media affordances and cultures inform both the moral and organisational dimensions of digital vigilantism. Digital vigilantism is a process where citizens are collectively offended by other citizen activity, and coordinate retaliation on mobile devices and social platforms. The offending acts range from mild breaches of social protocol to terrorist acts and participation in riots. The vigilantism includes, but is not limited to a ‘naming and shaming’ type of visibility, where the target’s home address, work details and other highly sensitive details are published on a public site (‘doxing’), followed by online as well as embodied harassment. The visibility produced through digital vigilantism is unwanted (the target is typically not soliciting publicity), intense (content like text, photos and videos can circulate to millions of users within a few days) and enduring (the vigilantism campaign may be top search item linked to the target, and even become a cultural reference). Such campaigns also further a merging of digital and physical spaces through the reproduction of localised and nationalist identities (through ‘us/them’ distinctions) on global digital platforms as an impetus for privacy violations and breaches of fundamental rights

Motion Detecting Method And Device

In some embodiments, a motion detecting device is configured to detect whether one or more movement events have occurred. The motion detecting device can include: (a) a processing module configured to run on a computational unit; and (b) a sensing device having: (1) one or more pressure sensors configured to provide two or more pressure measurements; and (2) a transmitter electrically coupled to the one or more pressure sensors and configured to transmit the two or more pressure measurements to the computational unit. The processing module is configured to use the two or more pressure measurements to determine whether the one or more movement events have occurred. The sensing device can be configured to be placed in at least one of ductwork of a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system or an air handler of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system. Other embodiments are disclosed.Georgia Tech Research Corporatio

Social Data Discovery and Proportional Privacy

Social media platforms aggregate large amounts of personal information as social data that can be easily downloaded as a complete archive. Litigants in civil cases increasingly seek out broad access to social data during the discovery process, often with few limits on the scope of such discovery. But unfettered access to social data implicates unique privacy concerns—concerns that should help define the proper scope of discovery. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, as amended in 2015, already contain the tools for crafting meaningful limits on intrusive social data discovery. In particular, the proportionality test under Rule 26 weighs the burdens of discovery against its benefits, creating important boundaries on discovery\u27s scope. Privacy burdens should be part of the proportionality analysis. By considering the privacy implications of social data discovery, courts can fashion fair and meaningful limits on the scope of social data discovery

Differentially Private Approval-Based Committee Voting

In this paper, we investigate tradeoffs between differential privacy (DP) and several voting axioms for approval-based committee voting, including proportionality, Pareto efficiency, Condorcet criterion, and strategyproofness. For all the axioms except strategyproofness, we show their incompatibility with DP, and provide both upper and lower bounds for their tradeoffs with DP. Furthermore, we show that any $\epsilon$-DP mechanism satisfies $e^{-\epsilon}$-cardinality strategyproofness, and the satisfaction can be further improved if the mechanism satisfies monotonicity

Surveillance in the Supermarket

In 2007, a city in the Netherlands provided a shop owner with a facial recognition system to detect known shop thieves. This camera system compared faces of individuals in the crowd with police photos of known local shoplifters. In this paper, I ask how facial recognition intervenes in the relations between the various actors involved in monitoring and controlling shop crime. In particular, I focus on how technology affects the pluralisation of surveillance, understood here as the state’s effort to mobilise new types of actors. By studying surveillance as a situated practice of making shoplifters visible, I show how facial recognition was in this case part of an effort to further enlist the supermarket in monitoring petty crime. I furthermore attend to the contingencies of this process. While surveillance technologies can potentially engage new actors, they do not necessarily do so as they may refuse to take part in a particular mode of surveillance. In other words, not only subjects of surveillance resist, resistances may also exist within the networks that perform surveillance