Rachel Finn

The surveillance of ‘prolific’ offenders: Beyond ‘docile bodies’

This article uses ethnographic research to explore how a sample of state-defined ‘prolific’ offenders living in Northern City (a small city in the North of England) experience and respond to a surveillance regime which includes ‘appointments’, ‘tracking’, ‘interviews’, ‘drug testing’, ‘electronic monitoring’, ‘home visits’ and ‘intelligence-led policing’. While some writers have argued that the experience of ‘house arrest’ and electronic monitoring is consistent with ‘disciplinary power’ and the ‘self-governing capabilities’ identified by Foucault, our article interweaves surveillance theory with the work of Pierre Bourdieu to argue that the ‘surveilled’ are a group of creative ‘social actors’ who may negotiate, modify, evade or contest surveillance practices.

Big Data, Drone Data: Privacy and Ethical Impacts of the Intersection Between Big Data and Civil Drone Deployments

This chapter examines the intersection between drone data and big data. It focuses on two uses of drones for civil purposes, crisis informatics and precision agriculture, neither of which are thought to raise significant privacy and ethical issues, as they do not focus on people. The chapter outlines the ways in which the integration of drones into big data collection systems augments the privacy and ethical issues raised by drones and big data. Specifically, integrating drone data with social media data in crisis informatics and integrating drone data with meteorological, topographical and consumer data in precision agriculture raises significant issues around identifiability, discrimination and equality and the digital divide. The chapter concludes that drones are increasingly becoming big data collection platforms, and as they become integrated with additional technologies and systems, it is problematic to characterise civil drone applications as either “high risk” or “low risk”. Instead, it is necessary to consider the privacy and ethical implications of all of the potential technologies involved rather than focusing on drones themselves.