Victoria Wang

Victoria Wang, John V. Tucker

Surveillance is a social phenomenon that is general and commonplace, employed by governments, companies and communities. Its ubiquity is due to technologies for gathering and processing data; its strong and obvious effects raise difficult social questions. We give a general definition of surveillance that captures the notion in diverse situations and we illustrate it with some disparate examples.A most important, if neglected,component idea is that of the identity of the people or objects observed. We propose a general definition of identifiers as data designed to specify the identity of an entity in some context or for some purpose. We examine the ways identifiers depend upon other identifiers and show the provenance of identifiers requires reductions between identifiers and a special idea of personal identifier. The theory is formalised mathematically. Finally, we reflect on the role of formal methods to give insights in sociological contexts.

Victoria Wang, John V. Tucker

Surveillance is a process that observes behaviour, recognises properties and identifies individuals. It has become a commonplace phenomenon in our everyday life. Many surveillance practices depend on the use of advanced technologies to collect, store and process data. We propose (i) an abstract definition of surveillance; and (ii) an abstract definition of identity, designed to capture the common structure of many disparate surveillance situations. We argue that the notion of identity is fundamental to surveillance. Rather than having a single identity, individuals have many identities, real and virtual, that are used in different aspects of their lives. Most aspects of life are subject to some form of surveillance, and observations and identities can be aggregated. The notion of identity needs to be theorised. Our analysis is very general and, at the same time, sufficiently precise to be the basis of mathematical models.