{"id":20938,"date":"2016-02-03T07:00:57","date_gmt":"2016-02-03T11:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=20938"},"modified":"2016-02-02T20:52:32","modified_gmt":"2016-02-03T00:52:32","slug":"just-wait-15-seconds-until-they-get-bored","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2016\/02\/03\/just-wait-15-seconds-until-they-get-bored\/","title":{"rendered":"Just Wait 15 Seconds Until They Get Bored"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Drone\"<\/a>Nick Bilton\u2019s neighbor flew a drone outside the window of Bilton\u2019s home office. It skeeved him out for a minute, but he got over it. His wife was more skeeved out. She may or may not have gotten over it (but probably not). Bilton wrote about the incident<\/a> for The New York Times, where he works as a columnist. Ultimately, Bilton\u2019s story concludes that drone watching is no big deal, analogous to peeping-via-binoculars, and that the best response is to simply ignore drone-watchers until they fly their devices away. With all of this, I disagree.<\/p>\n

Drone privacy is a fraught issue, one of the many in which slow legislative processes have been outpaced by technological developments. While there remains a paucity of personal-drone laws, the case precedent trends towards punishing those who damage other people\u2019s drones<\/a>, while protecting the drone owners who fly their devices into airspace around private homes. Through legal precedent, then, privacy takes a backseat to property.<\/p>\n

Bilton spends the majority of his article parsing this legal landscape, and tying the extant legal battles to his own experience of being watched. He begins with an account of looking out his window to see a buzzing drone hovering outside. He is both amused and disturbed, as the drone intrusion took place while he was already writing an article about drones. He reports feeling first violated and intruded upon, but this feeling quickly fades, morphing into quite the opposite. He says: \u00a0<\/p>\n

At first, I was upset and felt spied upon. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to the opposite conclusion. Maybe it\u2019s because I\u2019ve become inured to the reality of being monitored 24\/7, whether it\u2019s through surveillance cameras or Internet browsers. I see little difference between a drone hovering near my window, and someone standing across the street with a pair of binoculars. Both can peer into my office.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bilton\u2019s response is basically \u201cwell we\u2019re already constantly surveilled and always have been, so who cares if the technology is now aerial and our neighbors join the viewership?\u201d Apparently, his wife cares.<\/p>\n

Bilton concedes that his wife is far more put off by the neighborly drone visit than he. \u00a0She considers getting a shotgun, he reports. Though Bilton gives cursory attention to his wife\u2019s view and ponders the legal options for people who feel violated by drones, he eventually concludes with this dismissive advice: \u00a0\u201cdo what I did, which was to wait about 15 seconds until my neighbor got bored and flew the drone somewhere else.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

First, drones and binoculars are not the same. Not even close. Although Bilton acknowledges that drones are unique in their capacity to \u201c\u2026<\/em>reach into crevices of your home\u2026<\/em> and see from more invasive vantage points\u201d<\/em> he ignores their capacity for documentation.\u00a0 It\u2019s not just that drone technology grants viewers access to more and more granular images, but that images are produced, rather than merely experienced in fleeting (albeit violative) moments of looking. Binoculars archive voyeuristic images within a memory bank. Drones externalize the archive with the potential to distribute.<\/p>\n

But more importantly, neither drone nor binocular forms of spying are okay. Ever. It\u2019s positively strange to me that Bilton\u2019s defense of drones entails equating them with analog forms of peeping. I certainly wouldn\u2019t consider it benign to find a person hiding in the bushes across the street watching me in my bedroom. I doubt Bilton\u2019s wife would, either.<\/p>\n

Dismissal is a luxury, one that Bilton apparently enjoys. Although he presents a counter argument foiled in his wife\u2019s experience, Bilton treats his wife\u2019s account as just another opinion\u2014a balance point rounding out his less affected reaction. He did not, however, investigate the reason <\/em>he and his wife had such dissimilar reactions.\u00a0 Had Bilton focused on the underlying cause of he and his wife\u2019s fracture, the luxury of dismissal would likely have emerged. That cause, simply, is social position\u2014in this case, gender.<\/p>\n

The effects of surveillance are far from uniform. For many women, queer and trans* people, voyeurism has been and remains a reality to contend with and avoid. For people of color, surveillance is a key contributing factor in the disastrous rates of mass incarceration. Eschewing privacy has different consequences for different people. Those for whom the consequences are severe know this intrinsically. Those for whom the consequences are minimal can remain comfortably na\u00efve.<\/p>\n

Dismissing personal drones as technological objects that fly away after 15 seconds when their operators get bored ignores the staying power that those 15 seconds can entail. Such as the way those 15 seconds stay with watched subjects psychologically, imparting an omnipresent wariness even within the sacred confines of the home; or the way the 15 seconds stay with watched subjects as documented artifacts, distributed in ways over which the watched has no control.<\/p>\n

For Bilton, surveillance is an inconvenient but inevitable reality. Pushback seems futile, so why bother? But intrusive surveillance is only inevitable as long as people acquiesce, and acquiescence can be most effectively disrupted by centering surveillance analyses on the perspectives of those at the margins\u2014those for whom \u201cinevitable\u201d surveillance can be devastating.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jenny Davis is on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis<\/a><\/p>\n

Headline Pic Via: Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nick Bilton\u2019s neighbor flew a drone outside the window of Bilton\u2019s home office. It skeeved him out for a minute, but he got over it. His wife was more skeeved out. She may or may not have gotten over it (but probably not). Bilton wrote about the incident for The New York Times, where he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1753,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[36459,10794,55,36460,424,14],"class_list":["post-20938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-bilton","tag-drones","tag-gender","tag-ney-york-times","tag-privacy","tag-race"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1753"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20938"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20944,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20938\/revisions\/20944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}