Big Brother, Big Business: The Data-Mining and Surveillance Industries

This is a film with recorded proof of people overstepping boundaries with surveillance.  It explains how the fittingly named little black box that is built into cars can record how smoothly or roughly a driver drives and, in the future, could possibly end up giving out speeding tickets without an officer even having to be present. That is unnecessary surveillance of people and would eventually just cause people to an uproar.  In the Black Mirror episode, the mother can keep an eye on her daughter just like these black boxes can keep an eye on how safe a driver is (Jones 2017).  The film also talks about how Onstar can track a car’s location. This type of surveillance has caused issues in the past with car companies tracking people using rented cars (Big Brother).  Even Xerox printers use surveillance by printing tiny yellow dots on each page recording the serial number of the printer and the date and time the page was printed (Big Brother).  Howard Boyle, the President of Capitol Fire Sprinklers, tracks his employees without even telling them.  Using computer software, he can tell exactly where they are, how fast they drive and how long they were at a specific location.  He claims that this not overstepping any boundaries because it is “not a privacy issue” (Big Brother).  This is like when the mother in “Arkangel” does not tell her daughter that she is being tracked when she is older (Jones2017).  She apparently does not believe that watching what her daughter does all the time without informing her about it is a privacy issue.  Kevin Bankston says that if a person’s cell phone is on, then the cell phone company is receiving information about your location and storing that information too (Big Brother).  This is a big example of surveillance without letting people know they are being surveilled. When a customer calls, Jovia, a high end restaurant that is featured in this video, and leaves their name and phone number to make a reservation, the restaurant can see and keep track of how many times they have made reservations, how many times they have canceled, how many times they do not show up for their reservation, and how many times they have shown up.  The owner of Jovia also makes notes for if it is a customer’s birthday or if it is a difficult customer (Big Brother).  This could cause the restaurant to deny serving the customers who are difficult if they want to.  This act of keeping track of a difficult customer is similar to the episode in Black Mirror when the mother keeps track of her daughter’s dangerous behaviors when she is older. It is giving people less freedom and opportunities because of surveillance.  Verint Systems is a smart version of security cameras.  It is a surveillance system that watches customers so closely that even if a customer just stands in one place for too long, it alerts an employee to go make sure they are not stealing anything.  This is aggressive surveillance that involves recording people with extremely sensitive technology.  Probably the biggest form of dangerous surveillance in this film is Choice Point.  Choice Point is a company that keeps a database of information on every U.S. citizen. It keeps track of people’s “phone numbers, addresses, credit reports, property records, bank accounts, insurance policies, and social security numbers” (Big Brother).  It sells all of this information.  It can be assumed that in the future, like where the “Arkangel” episode takes place, the government is also tracking all of the information that the mom can see because the government tracks information in so many ways already (Jones 2017).  The Internet also keeps individuals’ information to possibly sell to companies or give to the government.  This is called data-mining.  For example, AOL keeps search history forthirty days and Google keeps search history in a database forever.  It even keeps a person’s deleted emails forat least two months (Big Brother).  These are just a few examples of how invasions of privacy are happening in the world currently.