Obfuscating surveillance - Will Core post 3/5

 Within this weeks readings on surveillance, I was particularly interested in the threads on resistance, indeterminacy and obfuscation. That is, ways to subvert the extraction and domination of surveillant infrastructures. To begin with, Simone Browne details how surveillant practices are rooted in racist and colonial histories. She presents "dark sousveillance" as a way of the oppressed to 'look back' at the oppressor. Browne suggests black folk to adopt the practices of their oppressors by filming, observing and making known the violence of oppression and slavery. In doing so, sousveillance empowers the oppressed to resist gaze of the master and organise against it.

Moreover, Gaboury details how queer theory can inform database systems and practices. By tracing the affordances and potentialities of NULL markers in SQL, Gaboury highlights how the indeterminacy of NULL markers can render data subjects as opaque to surveillant infrastructures. I take Rohan's point that NULL markers fail to entirely evade surveillant infrastructures. Indeed, even with NULL markers, a record corresponding to the resistor is still created, and still exists within the database. Yet, with the "totalization of environmental surveillance" as Andrejevic (2017), perhaps obfuscation is the best that we can possibly hope for.

And with that, I turn optimistically to Nissenbaum and Bunton who provide some wonderful grounded practices for 'obfuscating' surveillance capitalist infrastructures. They explain how these practices were born out of helplessness - the inability to escape being tracked led them to consider alternative approaches for protecting privacy and retaining autonomy. I want to take this opportunity to promote two of these tools that I have been using for some time.

First, AdNauseam asks what happens if instead of ignoring ads, we click on them. Of course, ads are used as general revenue for almost every website online. Clicking on ads provides those websites that you use with income. But they also build up your data profile, allowing for you to be categorised, profiled and effectively marketed to. As Gaboury explains: "Facebook doesn’t care who you are or how you identify; it only cares that you have an identity that is addressable by Facebook." AdNauseum not only acts as an ad blocker (and often a more effective one than 'free' corporatized models e.g., AdBlockPlus). It also obscures your 'real' clicks amongst the noise of interacting with the ads that it blocks. Similarly, Track Me Not works by regularly searching random phrases across Bing and Google, to 'hide' your legitimate searches. The idea of these extensions is that the 'signal' that is your legitimate internet activity is drowned out by the noise of illegitimate activity.