Daily Times

Facebook is changing the rules and regimes of visibility on social media. People create profiles on social network sites and Twitter accounts against the background of an audience. It is worrying that quite a few of us are either willingly or unwittingly giving up some of our own personal information. Interpersonal social media surveillance warrants a care of the virtual self. Yet this care is complicated by social media’s rapid growth, especially Facebook’s cross-contextual information flows that publicise otherwise private information. Although there is an important distinction to be made between information we knowingly sign away and private data that is seemingly subject to unwarranted searches and collection, many of us are careless in our release of personal data. We do not hesitate to hand over our privacy rights to corporations but we get touchy when the government tampers with our information even when we might be the ones allowing it. Harmless it may seem since one is just signing an email id but it actually focuses on how users perceive and manage their own visibility and take advantage of the visibility of other users. These experiences are tied to shifting understandings of private and public information, as well as new terms like stalking and creeping that frame surveillance practices.

‘Facebook stalking’ is now the increasingly common practice of digging through digital information on social network site Facebook, which works to find information about others. This ‘stalking’ is intimately tied to power relations: it is both a way to compensate for perceived weakness by obtaining social knowledge and maintaining status hierarchies by reinforcing the importance of others. A jealous husband scrutinising his wife’s Twitter feed can be reacting to a perception of lost control, a young boy or girl expecting friends to pay attention to what they post on Facebook is asserting their importance. The flux and flows of power relations are ongoing.

Do we ever worry that advanced surveillance programmes can now know quite enough about what we do and where we do it? Which is why Raytheon has been secretly developing a computer programme called Riot. Actually it stands for Rapid Information Overlay Technology and it is has the capability to collate that information instantly and seamlessly link it to any other online information that it can gather. It collates social media ‘check-ins’ to dot your movements over Google Maps and collates your social networking activity to see both who you are friends with and what you all like to spend your time doing. Add all that information together and you basically have an algorithm for predicting our behaviour. It is smart to work out where a dead man’s personality can be replicated from the traces of himself he left behind on social media. We are open books on social media but that will not always be the case. The question is: what else are they doing? Are they matching it with public records? Are they matching it with utility information? The big problem would start when it can match the online presence to an offline presence.

The Stasi (the East German secret police) watches football fans with advanced surveillance technology even though the technology is only supposed to be used against suspected terrorists. So, just as the drones have moved from American foreign policy into the domestic sphere, techniques once reserved for the most serious of threats are now being utilised in the fight against men throwing fists at one another in football grounds.

On one hand, many of us voluntarily broadcast our own photos and videos, disclose our relationship statuses, religions and political preferences, and post our employment histories. However, on the other hand, there is another level of sharing when we become active participants, engaging with social media sites that encourage us to check in at various hotspots or connect with other users via our location. We hand out the power to watch and manage our information to someone else, and show we are satisfied with that. It has become a normal and somewhat preferred form of communication among people to check Facebook and Twitter, and share photos on Instagram. But far too many social media apps now go a step further and help others pinpoint where we are on a map with a time stamp. For some, it is an accepted, though annoying, form of privacy invasion since social media allows us to remain in contact with our friends. But for others, it is all a game.

Foursquare is a location-based app that encourages users to check in at restaurants, bars, even public transportation systems, and compete with others to earn accolades by visiting the most spots. But these social media toys are not playful at all; they are a little frightening. Although we are occasionally reminded that social networks virtually own us, we too soon forget. Now, some social media users are downloading the trendy social discovery apps, which, by design, are the most dangerous within the cyber community, because many of them connect users to other people and events based, at least partly, on their physical locations.

People self-monitor their online actions to maintain a desired balance between publicity and seclusion, while readily consuming the profiles and status updates of others. This self-monitoring is related to internalising the practice of social surveillance. Few people seem to be bothered about their own online privacy but they all will once they realise that they cannot delete any of the private chats they have posted. When you hit enter on a computer, there is a digital trace that never goes away. Point blank, that is the bottom line. You may delete a Facebook account, but it does not mean they delete it. They keep it in their database. That is what people are not taking into consideration. It is like a memory that cannot always be removed.

Of course, we are not allowing social media sites permission to tap our telephones but we are permitting them to track our every move, figuratively and literally. That is arguably just as problematic, if not more so. So, maybe we are not victims of stolen identities after all, particularly when we are knowingly giving so much of it away.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com