Presented at
33C3 (2016),
Dec. 30, 2016, 1 p.m.
(30 minutes)
From geo-magnetic tracking for smartphones to facial recognition for email marketing, from physical shopping cart fingerprinting to computer vision algorithms that use your clothing as metadata, this talk will explore the emerging landscape of hyper-competitive retail surveillance. Instead of dramatizing these technologies which can lead to calcification and normalization, the aim of this talk is to energize discourse around building creative solutions to counter, adapt to, or rethink emerging surveillance technologies.
<p>Retail surveillance technologies are often overshadowed by more threatening government surveillance technologies, but retail surveillance presents a different kind of threat. It forms the foundation for bottom-up surveillance of personal data that would otherwise be too difficult for a government surveillance program to collect. Data including your most personal photos, messages, and movements are routinely collected and sold by commercial services. Retail surveillance also poses risks for data breaches and leaks and enables new forms of psychological and behavioral monitoring that aim to influence and control the behaviors of "consumers".</p>
<p>The biggest concern today, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/25/philip-zimmermann-king-encryption-reveals-fears-privacy">said</a> Phil Zimmerman (2015), is not software backdoors, but the petabytes of information being hoarded by the likes of Google and Facebook. Silent Circle co-founder Mike Janke has also <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p033l4k6">voiced concern</a> over this type of surveillance and data collection warning that "the data companies of the world have more data on you than GCHQ does, absolutely."</p>
<p>This talk will survey current and emerging trends and technologies used in retail surveillance with the goal of enabling others to create a more informed retail-surveillance threat model, countersurveillance workarounds, and knowledge for protest/democratic participation.</p>
Presenters:
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Adam Harvey
Adam Harvey is an artist and independent researcher based in Berlin. His work investigates the convergence of surveillance, privacy, and data analysis technologies. Past projects include CV Dazzle (2010), Stealth Wear (2013), Privacy Gift Shop (2013), and SKYLIFT (2016).
Harvey investigates the potential for anti-surveillance concepts to help navigate a world of mass surveillance. He is a graduate of New York University where he created CV Dazzle, camouflage from face detection. His counter-surveillance projects have appeared in the New York Times, Der Spiegel, BBC, the Air Force Times, and in a tweet from the Pentagon.
Currently, he lives and works in Berlin on developing new products for the Privacy Gift Shop, an online marketplace for countersurveillance and art.
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