Forget the government, you should be watching out for me

Mark Andrejevic's reading was on an issue - "peer-to-peer surveillance" (212) - that I've admittedly only been really conscious of very recently. A couple of months ago the New Zealand Herald ran an article on a Brazilian "Boyfriend Tracker" app that caused a lot of controversy due to its allowance of "NSA-level spying on suspected cheaters" (thanks International Business Times). Of course everyone I know uses Facebook and Google to "spy on" others, for example a friend (who will remain nameless) recently showed me a shirtless photo of a boy she had a crush on from class, but didn't personally know. However it wasn't until every article on this app referenced the US's National Security Agency that I began thinking about this kind of surveillance alongside governmental and corporation surveillance.

 

I’ve always thought that the spy and the spyee were the important factor in deciding whether a kind of surveillance should be taken seriously (hence why I hadn’t considered googling a new friend a form of surveillance before), but the “boyfriend tracker” case reveals that the level of surveillance, what one has access to, is perhaps more important. Many of the features of this app don’t seem too troubling thanks to the fact one can already gain this kind of information about your boyfriend or girlfriend very easily, like obtaining a call history and text messages (check their phone while they’re in the bathroom, duh). But others, like turning on their phone to listen to their environment are apparently a step too far. It is factors like this which bring people to draw comparisons between individuals spying on people they know, and the government spying on civilians.

 

I’m having a hard time deciding how sinister peer-to-peer surveillance is, especially when my friend’s trophy of a photo of her shirtless crush is paired against the malevolent figure of governmental surveillance. But perhaps it needs to be considered more on a case-by-case basis, and not every private individual has the best of intentions.