Privacy and Participation in Public:Data protection issues of crowdsourced surveillance

Prompted by the success of mobile games such as Pokémon Go, companies and governments have begun to 'crowdsource' their surveillance of public spaces. Data on, for example, traffic congestion or feelings of (in)safety in certain neighbourhoods is collected by many participants but processed by a single central organisation, such as a technology companies or the police. This is a cheap way of collecting data that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. However, this puts privacy in public spaces under severe pressure. Gerard Jan Ritsema van Eck describes in his dissertation how difficult it is to defend yourself legally against such crowdsourced surveillance. First, the effects of this surveillance often relate to groups of people, such as neighbourhood residents, while privacy law only protects individuals. Secondly, the law does not easily deal with the question of who is actually responsible when things go wrong. Finally, the right to privacy is (necessarily) weaker in public spaces, because you will always encounter others there. But it is also exactly there where crowdsourced surveillance is strongest. The dissertation analyses case studies with regard to, among other things, feelings of safety, the creation of interactive maps, and a game of the Dutch police to find stolen cars. These show that crowdsourced surveillance leads to increases in social control and risks such as discrimination. Ritsema van Eck argues for the tightening of 'data protection impact assessments' and for privacy rights for groups to limit the pernicious effects of crowdsourced surveillance in public spaces

Police bodycams as equiveillance tools? Reflections on the Debate in the Netherlands

In the United States of America, police body-worn cameras (bodycams) were introduced to protect civilians against violence by law enforcement authorities. In the Netherlands, however, the same technology has been introduced to record and discipline the behavior of the growing number of citizens using their smartphone cameras to film the (mis)conduct of police. In answer to these citizens sousveilling the police and publishing their images on social media, the bodycam was introduced as an objective referee that also includes the perspective of the police officer. According to this view, the bodycam is a tool of equiveillance: a situation with a diversity of perspectives in which surveillance and sousveillance are in balance (Mann 2005). Various factors, however, hamper the equiveillant usage of bodycams in the Netherlands. Firstly, the attachment of the bodycam to the uniform of the officer leads to an imbalanced representation of perspectives. The police perspective is emphasized by the footage that is literally taken from their perspective, in which others are filmed slightly from below, making them look bigger and more overwhelming. Also, the police officers’ movements create shaky footage with deceptive intensity that invokes the image of a hectic situation that calls for police action. Secondly, it is the officer who decides when to wear a camera and when to start and stop recording. This leaves the potential to not record any misconduct. Thirdly, access to the recorded images, whilst in theory open to police and citizens alike, is in practice exclusively for the police. Within the current regulatory framework, bodycams are thus not neutral reporters of interactions between civilians and the police. We will end our contribution to this Dialogue section with suggestions for the improvement of those rules and reflect on the question of whether bodycams can ever be objective referees

Editorial

That land-use and transport systems are interdependent and characterized by a two-way interaction is a well-known fact. The spatial configuration of activities influences the level and characteristics of transportation demand, and conversely, the location and quality of transportation infrastructure affects how activities are organized in space. Since the 1960s, several methodologies and models have been developed and used to examine the land-use and transport patterns and change. The research issues addressed using these models have, since the 1990s, been broadened to include sustainability impacts in transport policy, thereby strongly increasing modelling demands and raising several research challenges. This was the theme of a special session on ‘Land Use Transport Interaction Modelling and Sustainability’, as part of the international conference ‘Framing Land Use Dynamics’ held in April 2003 at Utrecht University (UU) in the Netherlands. The conference was organised as part of the Utrecht University’s multidisciplinary research programme, ‘Networks in the Delta’, aimed at developing a theoretical and methodological framework for understanding and modelling the complex interactions between socio-economic and environmental systems (see website Networks in the Delta (2004) for a full description). The papers included in this special issue of the European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research were presented at the conference under the theme, ‘Infrastructure, mobility and land-use planning’, focusing on transportation and land-use dynamics. Papers describe experiences with land-use and transport interaction models as impact assessment and policy appraisal tools, with contributions covering different local, regional and national spatial scales in Western European contexts, in particular, the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands.&nbsp

A Republican and Collective Approach to the Privacy and Surveillance Issues of Bodycams:A commentary

Body-worn cameras are quickly becoming ubiquitous in public spaces around the world. Whether worn by officers of the law or personnel of a local car parking authority, they present a unique form of surveillance which challenges privacy in public. Governments and other organizations are adopting laws, internal rules, and operational guidelines in a scramble to catch up with the rapid spread of the technology. This fragmented approach to policymaking has so far not provided a panacea to the surrounding privacy issues. In this contribution, we will apply the relatively underexplored theoretical angle of republican political theory and its focus on non-domination to this problem. We argue that taking a republican approach to the value of privacy might be a first step towards addressing some of the concerns raised by the chapters. We focus on two aspects of republican theory: the arbitrariness of interferences, and the closely related notion of freedom as non-domination rather than non-interference. The potential usefulness of the concept of collective privacy in this regard will also be discussed. First, however, we will summarize the preceding chapters which inform this analysis

A Republican and Collective Approach to the Privacy and Surveillance Issues of Bodycams:A commentary

Body-worn cameras are quickly becoming ubiquitous in public spaces around the world. Whether worn by officers of the law or personnel of a local car parking authority, they present a unique form of surveillance which challenges privacy in public. Governments and other organizations are adopting laws, internal rules, and operational guidelines in a scramble to catch up with the rapid spread of the technology. This fragmented approach to policymaking has so far not provided a panacea to the surrounding privacy issues. In this contribution, we will apply the relatively underexplored theoretical angle of republican political theory and its focus on non-domination to this problem. We argue that taking a republican approach to the value of privacy might be a first step towards addressing some of the concerns raised by the chapters. We focus on two aspects of republican theory: the arbitrariness of interferences, and the closely related notion of freedom as non-domination rather than non-interference. The potential usefulness of the concept of collective privacy in this regard will also be discussed. First, however, we will summarize the preceding chapters which inform this analysis