Consumer Surveillance Research Articles

Gambling Control in a Cost‐of‐Living Crisis: An Analysis of the White Paper High Stakes: Gambling Reform for the Digital Age (2023)

This article explains the broader stakes of contemporary British gambling reform debates, via an analysis of the White Paper High Stakes: Gambling Reform for the Digital Age (2023). I lay out the context to the White Paper, and I summarise its main proposals, focusing especially on efforts to reduce the harms caused by gambling. I also offer a critical analysis of one particularly significant and contentious proposed reform: mandated affordability checks for online gambling, when losses reach certain thresholds. I suggest that these checks reflect and deepen a shared regulatory, industry, and academic faith in online gambling technologies to resolve social responsibility problems, with wider implications for consumer surveillance and public health.

Analysing the Causes and Implications of the Privacy Paradox: Consumer Surveillance and Online Data Collection

Have you ever been bothered by wordy pages of the Terms of Agreement and directly selected agree without looking? With the advent of AI technology and its involvement in social media platforms on the internet, the 21st century is considered a relatively transparent (digital) era where personal information, preference, and behaviours are shared, studied, and manipulated online. Controversies lie in the extent to which the information is shared and whether they are leaked or legally authorised to be extracted. Although polls and surveys may suggest people care about their privacy, many still do not take measures to protect their privacy, and this inconsistency in attitudes is referred to as the ‘privacy paradox.’ Not only does this essay reveal the causes of privacy paradox and potential vulnerability faced by users, but it also investigates how these issues are reflected in reality, offers privacy regulation suggestions for businesses and policymakers in China, and captures a gender difference trend in terms of self-privacy regulations through surveying a selected sample of respondents and evaluating popular online responses on Chinese social media.

The Cop In Your Neighbor's Doorbell: Amazon Ring and the Spread of Participatory Mass Surveillance

Consumer surveillance products such as 'smart' doorbell cameras are an already-pervasive phenomenon in the U.S. These devices are marketed as personal and community security tools that allow users to answer their front door remotely, record "suspicious activity" captured by their cameras, and share reports with neighbors. The widespread use of doorbell cameras specifically, however, has created an opaque, wide-reaching surveillance network used by thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide. The full breadth of this network and how users operate on such platforms is largely unknown. Amazon Ring, one of the largest manufacturers of smart doorbells, offers a companion social networking app to their physical doorbells called Ring Neighbors that allows camera owners to share video and text posts with other camera owners that live nearby. In this paper, we use data collected from public posts on Neighbors to create the first comprehensive map and analysis of smart doorbell camera use across the continental U.S. We use spatial regression methods to estimate the county-level predictors of Neighbors app usage nationally. We then use Los Angeles, one of the most active areas of Ring usage in the country, as a case study to investigate how different neighborhoods in a racially heterogeneous city use a platform like Ring. Using a structured topic analysis and experimental survey design, we show that users actively frame video subjects as criminal and suspicious, that the race of a neighborhood has a significant impact on posting rates, and provide some evidence that Neighbors may be used as a racial gatekeeping tool, particularly by white neighborhoods that border non-white areas in Los Angeles.

Retail Analytics: Smart-Stores Saving Bricks and Mortar Retail or a Privacy Problem?

‘Bricks-and-mortar’ retailers are increasingly looking to retail analytics as a way of staying competitive with online counterparts. Retail analytics is a subset of big data analytics, and proponents contend that its use can provide a greater understanding of customer behaviours and patterns. To achieve this, retail analytics requires ‘smart-stores’ to collect and store as much data as possible about in-store customers, and to build detailed consumer profiles that can be used to sell products on an increasingly individualised basis. At the same time, enhanced efficiencies are gained by a better matching of staff resources and design of store layout that directly correspond to customer behaviours. The range of data collection and analysis technologies used in retail analytics is evolving and currently includes facial recognition software and video analytics, specially designed sensors, Bluetooth beacons, Wi-Fi data collections and point-of-sale systems, including loyalty cards. When these collection technologies are combined, a smart-store can, thus, resemble a sophisticated consumer surveillance system entailing numerous collectors and re-users of consumer-generated data. This article argues there is a disproportionate impact on privacy when compared to the benefits for retailers. It outlines the developing sphere of retail analytics and its manifestation through smart-stores. It considers some of the key privacy issues that emerge through retail analytics and the consequent surveillance and ‘datafication’ of everyday life. This includes the issue of whether collected data is personal information, the degree to which individuals can understand the multifaceted data collection processes of smart-stores, and the importance and weight to be attributed to privacy in any decision-making by stores in the uptake of various technologies.

CLOUD CULTURE: FLUID MEMORIES ON PLATFORM ENCLOSURES

This paper brings together emerging work on the platformisation of cultural production (Nieborg and Poell 2018; Duffy, Poell, and Nieborg 2019) with (critical) approaches to digital archiving (Berry 2016; Brügger 2018; Ben-David 2019) and algorithmic curation (Noble 2018; Amoore 2020) to explore a proposed emerging ‘cloud culture’. The term encompasses (1) the technological capacity to modify cultural commodities after they have reached (and perhaps experience by) users; (2) the erosion of digital ownership, emblematic of similar trends in companies limiting one’s ability to modify – or even repair – their owned hardware and software; and (3) the data-driven race for content optimisation, where platform owners use consumer surveillance to deliver their products for maximum engagement (Helles and Flyverbom 2019). These three components of the term are further explored in relation to the ontological and epistemological repercussions of a continually updating cultural commodities, across four key domains. First, cloud culture highlights $2 . Second, it emphasises the $2 , and the shift of platform power toward large-scale cultural revisions. Third, it alerts over the seeming $2 of replaced and rewritten digital objects. Fourth and ultimately, this might have severe repercussions on $2 both for media researchers and – more importantly – the public at large

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

Advertising Technologies, Tactics, and Aftermaths: The Unintended Consequences of Social Media, Branded Content, and Data Mining

Abstract: Advertising and technology have a long, synergistic history. That interrelationship affects the economics of the media industry, the content we receive, and the level of sponsorship opacity. Digital technologies have led to an increase in obscured commercial messages and consumer surveillance because the biases of these tools drive the push toward amassing data and creating a technology-tethered population. Four examples demonstrate the evolution of advertising techniques that have occurred due to changes in technology. The combination of technologies and techniques have created opportunities for divisiveness and hatred to flourish all in the name of advertising engagement.

HSAJAYA: An Improved Optimization Scheme for Consumer Surveillance Video Synopsis Generation

Video Surveillance is an active area of research and provides promising security measures for consumer applications. To ease consumer surveillance investigations, Video Synopsis (VS) serves as a powerful tool to assess hours of video in a shorter retro of time by projecting multiple objects concurrently. The optimization module in VS framework is considered to be a key module, yet to date, only traditional optimization techniques have been addressed for energy minimization. Amongst these, simulated annealing (SA) has been broadly employed to produce global optimal solution without getting trapped in local minima. However, the convergence time of SA is quite high as the next state is chosen randomly to achieve real-time performance. This article presents an improved energy minimization scheme using hybridization of SA and JAYA algorithm to achieve global optimal solution with faster convergence rate. The weights associated with the energy function are computed using analytic hierarchy process (AHP) instead of heuristic selection. From experimental evaluations and analysis, it is seen that the proposed scheme exhibits superior performance to minimize the overall energy cost with lesser computational time. The proposed scheme has a potential to quickly review consumer surveillance video data in a smart and efficient way.

Beyond concern: socio-demographic and attitudinal influences on privacy and disclosure choices

ABSTRACTThe co-option of consumers as unwilling agents in their own surveillance has enabled significant abuses of consumer privacy. Previous studies have largely used privacy concern as a proxy for overall privacy attitudes. In this study, we implement a choice experiment in combination with measures adapted from Communication Privacy Management theory to enable a broader exploration of the influences of privacy attitudes by contextualising privacy as a negotiation about accessibility over contextual boundaries. Key findings suggest individuals’ social media disclosure decisions are influenced at least in part by their privacy attitudes, particularly with respect to information categories which may cue other personal information. Findings are also presented on consumers’ willingness to pay for privacy, with implications for alternative revenue streams not built on consumer surveillance.

Amazon: Surveillance as a Service

This essay argues that Amazon, the leading e-commerce platform in many parts of the world, uses surveillance not just as a key tool in the platform logic of its growing constellation of businesses but also increasingly as a service to its consumers. In contrast to prevailing assumptions that platforms will obscure the surveillant aspects of their businesses and that users will resist the intrusive nature of corporate surveillance, Amazon’s business practices point to the rapid normalization, and even embrace, of surveillant logics by consumers. Given the importance of consumer data to its operations, Amazon increasingly designs services whose purpose is, at least in part, to collect more data about consumers. The zenith of Amazon’s surveillance capabilities of its customers is no doubt its family of Echo devices enabled by the artificial intelligence interactive-voice service Alexa, which connects to the cloud run by Amazon, itself, through Amazon Web Services. Alexa is similar to competing digital voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant, but with more cultural visibility, worldwide market penetration, and greater integration with a host of Internet-of-Things devices produced by a variety of manufacturers. Amazon seeks to make Alexa an indispensable service to consumers, one that sweetens the granular forms of surveillance in more private spaces and situations that it now has the capability to gather, relative to the company’s more established forms of surveillance. While a typical association with surveillance might be the alienation and disempowerment of social control, I suggest that Amazon’s practices of consumer surveillance cultivate a sense of intimacy, borne of being seen between consumer and brand. In other words, I advocate for recognizing the subjectification of contemporary practices of platform surveillance, in addition to its structural elements.

From Credit Reports to Data Markets: The Stratifying Effects of Risk Measurement - Josh Lauer, Creditworthy. A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America (New York, Columbia Studies in the History of US Capitalism, Columbia University Press, 2017)

From Credit Reports to Data Markets: The Stratifying Effects of Risk Measurement - Josh Lauer, Creditworthy. A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America (New York, Columbia Studies in the History of US Capitalism, Columbia University Press, 2017)

<em>Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America</em> by Josh Lauer

In September of 2017 Equifax, one of the three major consumer credit reporting agencies in the United States, announced its system security had been breached and confidential consumer information may have fallen into the hands of hackers. Although reports of system intrusions are released almost daily, this breach was of particular significance: sensitive data, including personal, identifying and financial data, was compromised for an estimated 143 million consumers in the United States. Just this week, Equifax further disclosed another 15 million client records were breached in the United Kingdom. Any consumer who has received credit of any kind is familiar with the big three credit reporting agencies—Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian—as these agencies house the financial identities American consumers. With such vast data stores, credit reporting agencies are prime and potentially profitable targets for hackers. All the information a hacker needs to steal a financial identify of a victim resides in the agencies’ files. Clearly, credit reporting agencies play a critical role in the financial marketplace. How these agencies became the powerful guardians and suppliers of consumer financial information is the topic of Josh Lauer’s book, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America. This is the first book authored by Lauer, who is an associate professor of media studies at the University of New Hampshire with specialties in media history and theory, communication technology, consumer and financial culture, and surveillance. Lauer relates in great detail how we moved from a society of relationships and human interaction to one of faceless data designed to symbolize character and reputation. Lauer’s history takes us from a time when Americans desired access to goods and services more than they valued confidentiality, to the financial privacy concerns of these surveillance systems today.

Josh Lauer. Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America.

Josh Lauer. Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America.

Review of Lauer's Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America

Review of Lauer's Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America

Book Reviews

David Flynn of University of North Dakota reviews “Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America,” by Josh Lauer. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Details the rise of consumer credit surveillance in the United States and its ongoing effort to control the behavior of American citizens and quantify their value in a variety of contexts in an effort to make them “good”—morally responsible, obedient, predictable, and profitable.”

An impulse to exploit: the behavioral turn in data-driven marketing

ABSTRACTIndustry advocates argue that by tailoring services and commercial solicitations to match media users’ personal interests, data-driven marketing benefits both consumers and businesses. This article shows, however, that advertisers and marketers who are taking up ideas and techniques from behavioral economics tell their clients a very different story about the aims and use of digital marketing and consumer surveillance. Listening in on this discourse demonstrates that some digital marketers conceptualize their own practices as forms of social control, appropriating concepts from behavioral economics to identify consumers’ cognitive and affective biases and target their vulnerabilities. Behavioral economics recognizes that economic decisions are not simply dictated by rational self-interest; rather, such choices depend on cognitive heuristics and habits, and can be manipulated through the design of “choice architecture.” This article discusses implications of the behavioral turn in data-driven marketing for critical advertising scholars, public advocates, and regulators.

Is Your Neighbor and Democrat or a Republican? Lateral Voter Surveillance and the Political Culture of Modern Election Campaigns

The conventional wisdom is that the modern political campaign needs to be “data driven” to consolidate existing support and to find potential new voters and donors. The capture and consolidation of these data permit the construction of detailed profiles on individual voters and the “micro-targeting” of increasingly precise messages to increasingly refined segments of the electorate, especially in marginal states and districts, and using the most effective means of communication. At the same time, in the name of more efficient, cost-effective and widespread voter engagement, political parties and candidates are making full use of mobile technology and decentralizing intelligence on voter operations. I have argued elsewhere that these practices constitute a form of surveillance. Just as we have conceptualized consumer or employee surveillance, it is logical to isolate and examine voter surveillance, and consider its distinctive dynamics, risks and norms. This paper delves deeper into the centralizing versus decentralizing aspects of voter surveillance, and particularly into mobile canvassing and ‘targeted sharing’ through social media. After a more complete overview of these practices, I consider the question of lateral or “peer-to-peer” surveillance, and assess whether contemporary campaigning can appropriately be considered and understood according to these concepts. There are some unique features of voter surveillance by candidates and parties that are not adequately framed or explained by existing surveillance theory.

All consuming surveillance: surveillance as marketplace icon

ABSTRACTWith consumers and their activities routinely visible through online, mobile and social media, to both their peers and to corporations, this article examines surveillance as a marketplace icon. Surveillance is central to the construction of consumers and markets. Many contemporary marketing practices are surveillant as they rely on the collection, analysis and application of consumer data to place advertising, define market segments and to nudge consumer behaviours. Consumer surveillance is also an enactment of corporate power, attempting to align individual preferences with corporate goals. The historical origins of surveillance and the emergence of the surveillance–industrial–entertainment complex are explored, which highlights how surveillance, as well as a process for defining markets is also an object of consumption. The future sees a huge struggle for consumer data between two great centres of surveillance power – the state and the corporation – as they battle over data use for national security.

Who's Looking At Whom

Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet (eds), Feminist Surveillance Studies, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2015, 304pp. Rachel Dubrofsky and Shoshana Magnet's introduction to Feminist Surveillance Studies begins with a description of an academic scene: At a recent roundtable of academics and privacy advocates discussing surveillance studies and inequality, the conversation variously turned to consumer surveillance, new technologies, and the weakened legislative climate on privacy in both the United States and Canada. While we share the interests of the discussants, we wonder at the place of feminist concerns about surveillance and issues of inequality (p1). I turn to the resulting book Feminist Surveillance Studies off the back of a similar scene--an academic symposium on transparency and secrecy--with similar questions. As Rachel Hall notes, in her chapter for Feminist Surveillance Studies on the use of full body scanners in US airports, transparency is a threshold concept for all those interrogating public practices of surveillance and governance. Hall writes that an 'aesthetics of transparency' can be defined as the forcing of 'a correspondence between interiority and exteriority on the objects of the preventative gaze, or better yet, to flatten the object of surveillance' (p127). What this new collection convincingly asserts is that the demand for transparency placed on people by governing regimes does not affect all equally; that 'correspondences' are forced and made in service of different ideological ends; and that the academic and activist methods we might have for analysing, interrogating and countering regimes of transparency and surveillance must be able to engage 'terms of gendered, sexualized, raced and classed representations of bodies' (p2). Feminist Surveillance Studies is a collection of eleven chapters that model different ways of doing Feminist Surveillance Studies. The chapters are varied, and include writing on surveillance as an apparatus for making colonial violence thinkable, and actionable; on surveillance and the work of anti-sex-trafficking advocacy in the mid-twentieth century; on the birth certificate as surveillance apparatus, as highlighted in the legal history of a transgender persons' right to have their birth certificate changed; on transnational surrogacy and new media communications; on police photos of 'the battered face of the popular U.S. singer Rihanna Fenty', and the way the police camera 'flash regulates skin colour to produce the subject of domestic abuse' (pp1078). Although the chapters vary by subject and methodology they speak to and across each other and together they model the precise and provocative benefits of a feminist intervention in surveillance studies. The collection is also committed to underscoring the historical, or rather foundational, aspect of surveillance. As Andrea Smith argues in her chapter on settler violence and surveillance, '[t]here is not a pure or benign state beyond its strategies of surveillance' (p35). This kind of critical insight runs throughout the collection and frequently stems directly from fields of discourse beyond the discipline of surveillance studies. This is particularly the case in chapters by Andrea Smith, Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah and Kelli D. Moore which write through the intersections of anticolonial, legal, feminist and media frameworks. It is further evidenced in Yasmin Jiwani's chapter on killings and 'interlocking surveillance(s). In her analysis of a case of femicide in Canada in 2009 that was presented in the media and court as an killing, and so an exceptional event, Jiwani argues '[t]he mediated emphasis on honour killing as a particularly exotic variant of femicide contributed to the hypervisibility of the Shafia case against the unstated and muted backdrop of the everyday gendered violence that women experience, or of the prevalent femicide of specific groups of women' (p80). …

Knowing the Child Consumer through Box Tops: Data Collection, Measurement, and Advertising to Children, 1920–1945

National advertisers took an earnest interest in children during the first half of the 20th century. Throughout this period, food advertisers commonly offered children membership in clubs and premiums (prizes) in exchange for proofs of purchase, such as box tops. This article, relying upon primary research from the advertising trade press and ad agency archives, considers box tops as instruments that generated market-relevant knowledge. I argue that the submission of box tops to advertisers was an early form of data mining—used to learn about and better target consumers, but also as an audience metric, an ad hoc ratings system for print and radio broadcast sponsorship investments. These arguments are contextualized in critical theories that suggest commercial media audiences, as well as consumers more broadly, are manufactured and that measurement plays a central role in the processes of audience manufacture and commodification. I draw two important conclusions. First, this research demonstrates that consumer surveillance is not unique to the digital era of advertising. Second, I conclude that by “knowing” children through box top submissions, the advertising industry socially constructed the child consumer; that is, measurement through box tops constructed the very audience it sought to measure.