Chapter 6: The ‘‘State’’ of a Panoptic Medium - Profiling Machines [Electronic resources] : Mapping the Personal Information Economy نسخه متنی

Chapter 6: The ‘‘State’’ of a Panoptic Medium

Overview

I initially disagreed with Arie Altena’s (1999) claim that the Web browser had outlived its usefulness. If the browser was dead, as Altena claimed, then why was a corporation like America Online so interested in acquiring Netscape? Why would the U.S. federal government, in conjunction with many state governments, spend so much money trying to eliminate the monopolistic aspects of Microsoft’s tactics in the ‘‘browser wars’’? Since almost every previously autonomous computer network or program has migrated to the Web, isn’t the Web browser more powerful than ever?

But Altena was less interested in the consumer use of the Web and more concerned with the artistic and creative possibilities of the underlying decentered architecture of the Internet. The flexibility of the Web had overloaded the ‘‘dinosoar’’-like 4.0 browsers that had effectively become ‘‘unmanageable, too big to maneuver with ease’’ (Altena 1999). Mobile applications on hand-held computers, and with specialized software and open-source software such as Linux have started to chip away at the assumption of universality—a one-size-fits-all Web browser.

The overwhelming popularity of Napster and a host of other similar peer-to-peer networks has also proven that the limits of the browser can be discussed in decidedly mass consumer terms. As a computer program that harnessed the decentered architecture of the Internet, at least for a short time, Napster’s file-sharing software successfully challenged the music recording industry’s stranglehold on the ownership and distribution of popular music. No successful challenges have yet been made to the corporate ownership and distribution of users’ personal information on the Web. Rather, as this chapter shows, the Web browser and its accompanying ‘‘cookies’’ have played central roles in automating, to varying degrees, the collection of Web users’ personal information. Any attempts by a user to qualify or reject the software’s use of cookies (and by extension the corporate sponsor’s collection of a user’s personal Web-browsing habits) effectively crashes some of the most popular interactive functions of the Web, exposing the conditions and requirements of new media interactivity. Thus, Web cookies have effectively produced a symbiotic, panoptic relationship at the interface of the browser and the Web, an intransigent ‘‘state’’ that remains in place despite a diligent user’s best attempts to change a browser’s cookie preferences.

Most privacy advocates and theorists of media surveillance have warned that ubiquitous collecting of personal information— especially the automatic, enticed, or outright coerced collection of personal information—can lead to increased amounts of junk mail, identity theft, insecure consumer databases, and ‘‘social sorting’’ (Lyon 2001), customized Web content that limits access to different political perspectives and consumer products (Sunstein 2001). Although privacy concerns continue to be documented and debated in policy circles, such effects of online surveillance and user profiling do not by themselves explain how the collection of personal information is enabled by new media technologies. Likewise, the focus on panoptic effects cannot explain why users do not simply ‘‘opt out’’ of solicitation for personal information.^[1]

This chapter argues that the Web-browser medium has become inseparable from the process of user surveillance. At its most basic level, Web surveillance—the solicitation of personal information and the tracking of user behavior—is enabled by a continuous connection between Web surfers and servers. Unfortunately, privacy-conscious users who try to counter the potential effects of online surveillance require extensive software expertise and a great deal of time to find the privacy preferences, and ultimately, even after a great deal of work, they discover that changing the cookie preferences of their browsers ends up degrading many popular interactive functions on the Web.

^[1]A study from Jupiter Media Metrix indicates that almost 70 percent of U.S. consumers worry that their privacy is at risk online (hhttp://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905358019&rel=truei, accessed June 4, 2002).