Clarifying Uberveillance

From M.G. Michael, University of Wollongong, Australia: First, permit me to congratulate you and your team on the fine and important work which you are doing. You have loads of experience and you know what you are talking about. I feel the same way about Simon Davies‟ work and his own group, Privacy International, in London. The more open and accessible this debate on privacy and technology becomes the more hope there is of adequate safeguards being introduced (though sometimes I wonder if we have left it a little too late). In reference to your report of my presentation at the conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners in September [see PJ Oct 07], unfortunately, for better or for worse, at the end of my presentation I made some additional re-marks about mental illness arising from the application of [“uberveillance”] technology. These remarks were taken away by the news media at the expense of our original definition of “uberveillance” [see Just Published, page seven]. What we more precisely mean by uberveillance is to an extent the opposite of what we normally understand by “Big Brother.” That is, where “Big Brother” is on the outside (CCTV, etc) looking down, uberveillance is on the inside looking out (implants in the body itself, RFID or GPS on a microchip, hybrid architectures al-ready on the drawing board, etc.) In a sense, uberveillance stands “Big Brother” on its head.

Citation: Letter (by MG Michael) to the Editor, Robert Ellis Smith, Privacy Journal, January 2008 Volume 34, Number 3, p. 6.