Assessing Security Technology’s Impact: Old Tools for New Problems

Abstract

The general idea developed in this paper from a sociological perspective is that some of the foundational categories on which the debate about privacy, security and technology rests are blurring. This process is a consequence of a blurring of physical and digital worlds. In order to define limits for legitimate use of intrusive digital technologies, one has to refer to binary distinctions such as private versus public, human versus technical, security versus insecurity to draw differences determining limits for the use of surveillance technologies. These distinctions developed in the physical world and are rooted in a cultural understanding of pre-digital culture. Attempts to capture the problems emerging with the implementation of security technologies using legal reasoning encounter a number of problems since law is by definition oriented backwards, adapting new developments to existing traditions, whereas the intrusion of new technologies in the physical world produces changes and creates fundamentally new problems.

Between Technological Utopia and Dystopia: Online Expression of Compulsory Use of Surveillance Technology

“…There have been decades-long studies in privacy, surveillance technologies, and social control (Kreissl, 2014 ), but these studied surveillance technologies were not completely compulsory at a societal level. This study was among the first that could add to the surveillance literature by investigating a compulsory technology causing wide-range and long-term societal impacts.…”

Considering the Human Implications of New and Emerging Technologies in the Area of Human Security

“…Kreissl (2014) takes a coherent navigation between security technology and technological security. Kreissl discusses most of the theoretical topics that have been faced in this introduction.…”

‘Financially Sorted Kiwis’: A critical enquiry into consumer credit scoring systems and subjectivities in New Zealand

“…His protest was based on the fact that scoring formulae, despite claiming to be Meanwhile, noting the intrusion of the power of finance capital into our 'not-so-secret' lives, Roderick (2014) suggests that credit scoring agencies are not only in the business of peddling reputations, but act as an important governance and control mechanism for the disciplining of consuming citizen-subjects. Confidentiality, social standing and social control are thus pulled into the orbit of political economy, theorised, as Kreissl (2014) has done, as an appeal to security couched in a discourse of financial risk within the parameters of an expanded security state. Langley (2014) conceives of credit scoring as a way of controlling consumers through market mechanisms and risk-based prices, summoning up a rational and hopeful subject with an entrepreneurial disposition towards credit.…”