To browse Academia. Surveillance is a central organizing practice. Gathering personal data and processing them in searchable databases drives administrative efficiency but also raises questions about security, governance, civil liberties and privacy.
Surveillance is both globalized in cooperative schemes, such as sharing biometric data, and localized in the daily minutiae of social life. This innovative Handbook explores the empirical, theoretical and ethical issues around surveillance and its use in daily life. Why so much attention is increasing in regards to surveillance since the last decade? Are there any differences between the surveillance since the times of the Roman Empire with surveillance today?
And if so what are they? All these questions will be answered in this paper. It will begin by attempting to define what is surveillance, then it will examine the House of Lords Report HOL on this subject, then it will critically examine some of the issues raised in the report; particularly how surveillance shapes the relationship between the citizens and the state, the Public-Private sectors relationship, and abuses of surveillance.
Surveillance has become a crucial component of all environments informed or enabled by ICTs. Equally, almost all surveillance practices in technologically 'advanced' societies are enhanced and amplified by ICTs. Surveillance is understood as any focused attention to personal details for the purposes of influence, management, or control. Thus in addition to those who may be 'suspects' because of alleged offences , ordinary persons in everyday lifeworkers, consumers, citizens, travellers --find that their personal data are of interest to others.
Agencies process personal data in order to calculate risks or to predict opportunities, classifying and profiling their records routinely. While everyday life may thus seem less 'private', and ordinary people may feel that they are more vulnerable to intrusion, the use of searchable databases for categorizing and profiling means that deeper questions of power are involved. Life chances and choices are affected -sometimes negatively -by the judgments made on the basis of concatenated data, which means that such surveillance is implicated in basic questions of social justice, to do with access, risk distribution and freedom.
