surveillance

surveillance is not an aspect of the internet i have really thought about to much. I have always had an anti virus on my computer so thought that would keep me safe from the nasties that can pick up passwords and what not. The lectures opened my mind up alot to surveillance and all the different types that are around. I have always sort off assumed that surveillance was there to protect us and to focus primarily on thieves but now i know a bit different. 

Last year when using the otago internet server it was the first time i had noticed some kind of surveillance. There were certain programs i could not use and downloading was near impossible. When i realized that someone could be watching my every move on the internet and find out what exactly i had done it made me abit more wary. Not that i was going to any inappropriate sites or anything but just the fact that someone could be 'watching'.

Some forms of surveillance are appropriate and others not so much. Like i said in class how when i was working in an office over summer and i would flick onto trademe, facebook or any other kind of non-work related website for to long my computer would be taken over by the administrator and a msg would pop up saying something along the lines of "Is this work related?". This kind of surveillance is ok i think as if i hadnt had someone monitoring what i was doing i most prob would have spent alot of my time doing my own thing. I have heard of quite a few office environments with this type of surveillance and i do think it is kind of necessary otherwise staff are just wasting their bosses time and money. On the same topic tho, i dont think it should be possible for bosses to be able to access exactly what you are at the time for example checking your email, that more is a breech of privacy and is really no ones business apart from yours.

As Erika was saying in the lecture about surveillance being good or bad and how the majority of us didnt seem to mind it, i think that just comes from how we have perceived it growing up. For me personally i have never had a bad experience with it and have only really seen it do good so really i dont have any reason to not like the idea of it. It is still such a new idea really and still has a long way to grow in terms of internet surveillance and the whole ECHELON thing. As Nicole was saying with the whole Big Brother thing, it naturalizes surveillance by using it in a natural environment. 

Surveillance to me still does seem like a good thing. For example the cameras all along George st really do actually make me feel safer if walking home from work at night, the idea that someone is watching and if anything was to go wrong it would all be seen. So until me and surveillance have a bad experience im on its side :)