Does Mass Surveillance Change the Way We Behave? “Privacy Data” Collected on a Global Scale
Are You Looking at Me? Are You Looking at Me Looking at You?
By Boen Wang
Global Research
December 04, 2015
On Sunday, the NSA was forced to shut down its bulk collection of the phone records of Americans. While that program may have ended — and there is evidence that it may not have — the world now knows the spy agency’s capabilities, and that is changing the behavior of people everywhere.
How much, and in what way, is currently being studied. What effect does the awareness of surveillance have on the behavior of people? WhoWhatWhy looked at the available results of research being conducted, and found that we may be reaching the tipping point — when awareness of being watched starts to affect behavior.
Helsinki Syndrome
A team of researchers from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology recorded nearly every piece of data — calls, texts, GPS locations, keypresses, mouse clicks, screenshots of computer desktops, browsing histories, and credit card usages, a total of 32 TB of data from 10 households — for an entire year. They found that constant, intrusive surveillance consistently resulted in behavioral effects.
As Oulasvirta explained, “people may stop being careful after they have slipped at least once. Digital records that are not erased will contain that slip (potentially) for a long time.”
The researchers called the study ”The Helsinki Privacy Experiment,” and in September 2012 they published their findings in the paper, “Long-term Effects of Ubiquitous Surveillance in the Home.”
Interestingly, the researchers found that increased surveillance did not necessarily increase stress.
However, Antti Oulasvirta, lead author and electrical engineering professor at Aalto University, warned against jumping to conclusions based on the above. “You have to remember that they self-selected themselves to the study, consented, and knew how the data is going to be treated and used. This is not the case with the NSA, for instance,” he told WhoWhatWhy.
While there were few psychological impacts, researchers found significant changes in subjects’ behavior.
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