Your City is Watching You

RTE Ireland's National TV and Radio Broadcaster (July 10, 2018) published an interesting article: "Your city is watching you", asking the question " if you are a law abiding citizen, should the amount of surveillance you encounter on a daily basis be a matter of concern?" 

With all its digital surveillance apparatus, the contemporary city constitutes a reverse format of the Panopticon, the penitentiary model conceptualized by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. This consisted of a circular building with prison cells surrounding a tower in the middle where a single watchman had direct visual contact with all the cells. As inmates couldn’t tell which way the watchman was looking, they had to assume that they were being watched at all times, which in turn regulated their behavior.

Nowadays, we are all standing in the tower in the middle and subject to the surveillance of a network multiple cameras, audio monitoring systems and several types of sensors. Although we are so used to it that we take it for granted and it doesn’t necessarily impact on our behavior in public space, we know for certain that we are being watched. However, what we don’t know is how all this personal information about us which is harvested in public space is processed, where it is kept and for what reasons it is being processed.

But should we be concerned?
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