Tjerk Timan

Surveillance, Self and Smartphones: Tracking Practices in the Nightlife

This paper is the result of the EMERGING ICT FOR CITIZEN VEILLANCE-workshop organized by the JRC, Ispra, Italy, March 2014. The aim of this paper is to explore how the subject participates in surveillance situations with a particular focus on how users experience everyday tracking technologies and practices. Its theoretical points of departure stem from Surveillance Studies in general and notions of participatory surveillance (Albrechtslund 2008) and empowering exhibitionism (Koskela in Surveill Soc 2(2/3):199–215, 2004) in particular. We apply these theoretical notions on smartphones and its users to investigate the combination of participation and surveillance. Empirically, the paper uses interviews held with urban nightlife visitors to uncover practices of smartphone use. This qualitative and explorative study contributes to the concept of participatory surveillance by discussing to what extent smartphone-users’ actions and motivations can be seen as forms of surveillance and how that influences these actors in a (nightly) public space. We finish by setting out directions for studying mobile technologies of the self.

Introduction: conceptual directions for privacy in public space: Conceptual and Regulatory Challenges

Since its start, the twenty-first century has posed new challenges to privacy—challenges that have affected many areas of professional practice and are straining legal doctrines drafted in the previous century. At a conceptual level, the private space/public space dichotomy also increasingly fails to capture and describe privacy problems in a satisfying manner. This volume is aimed at addressing these challenges, by exploring and developing a research agenda on privacy in public space that crosses disciplinary boundaries. It includes contributions from primarily legal and philosophical scholars, but because the issues raised by privacy in public space extend well beyond disciplinary borders, it also features contributions that draw on geography and other social sciences. Each of these chapters contributes to the debate about what privacy in public is or can be from a different angle, by providing new arguments, concepts, ideas or insights. Bringing together law and philosophy seems particularly fitting for an exploration of this topic; while the legal contributions draw on actual real-world examples to lay bare the problems of privacy in public space, the philosophical contributions explore how we can better conceptualize privacy in public space by drawing on examples, normative argumentation and existing empirical research. The central theme of this introductory chapter is to explore conceptual paths for thinking about privacy in public. The authors in this volume have given various accounts of what privacy in public space is or can be, and discussed ethical, social and legal problems that arise when the private (information, activity, etc.) enters public space. Due to the proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICTs), more and more aspects of our private lives are spilling over into public space. We carry phones, laptops and other wearable computing devices— each of which potentially contains large amounts of personal (private) data—with us as we traverse a variety of public and private spaces each

Policy, Design and Use of Police-Worn Bodycameras in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, police-worn body cameras have been tested and deployed since 2009. Their introduction followed after allegedly positive results of body camera practices in the UK. Although a body camera is single-purpose in the sense of functionality (to record the moving image), its places and types of use are multiple. This paper investigates the body camera in the context of surveillance practices in Dutch nightlife districts, being a part of a larger research project investigating surveillance in urban nightscapes. This paper aims to understand which meanings and practices of use of the body camera are articulated and how the body camera alters surveillance practices in these nightlife districts. What does this new surveillance artifact do in use practice and how did it come into being in the particular way it is now? To answer these questions, I will focus on three groups of actors that are involved in the development and use of body cameras in the Netherlands, being policymakers, designers and police officers.