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THE DOCUMENT PEOPLE:

Privacy, Identity, and Continuous Personal Experience Capture

Ian Kerr and Jane Bailey

University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law

Abstract

While the rest of North America was ringing-in 2004, JenniCam, the electronic eye providing the digital window into Jennifer Ringley’s postmodern soul briefly blinked, and was then forever shut. Still open, however, are the online peepholes and peepshows cobbled together from downloads and archived excerpts made possible by her webcam’s once-unblinking eye. As a result, a self-described “social experiment” that might have challenged both unduly constraining social constructions of “woman” and divisions between public and private life was co-opted into enduring vignettes of sexual objectification that, by robbing Ringley’s documentary of its context, reinforce many of the very messages she may have hoped her electronic eye would assist her in contradicting.

During the same year that Ringley’s seven years of relentless recording finally ceased, the Association of Computing Machinery hosted an international workshop that would give new meaning to the phrase, seize the day. Aptly styled “CARPE”, the subject matter of the workshop was the Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences. Inspired not by Ringley’s continuous documentary but by the great vision of Vannevar Bush’s and his futuristic memex [1], leading researchers from across the globe gathered at Columbia University to investigate the manner in which the continuous archival paradigm fundamentally alters our relationship to biological memory. In the workshop’s keynote address, Professor Steve Mann described an invention called EyeTap [2], a “visual memory prosthetic” that enables Mann to continuously archive and retrieve his entire life by turning his eye into a camera and his body into a web server.

In the paper he submitted for the CARPE workshop, Mann offered a framework for understanding the social implications of continuous personal experience capture, positing a notion he calls “equiveillance” in support of his claim that the ability to capture, archive and retrieve one’s personal experiences is a privacy-enhancing antidote to excessive state and private sector surveillance. Likening his EyeTap to the blackbox flight recorder in an airplane, Mann claimed that a first-person recording of an activity, in which the person doing the recording is a participant, enhances public safety and provides participants with a means to counter traditional power structures by providing an alternative documentary of events should disputes arise.

Ringley and Mann are both pioneers in the study of the unblinking gaze. Though they differ substantially in their approaches, both voluntarily adopted personal experience capture devices as a perceived means of social empowerment. While much has been written about their personal escapades, there remains a paucity of analysis of the consequences of their practices on the collective and on their long-run potential to undermine rather than promote self- or group-empowerment. In this presentation, Ian Kerr and Jane Bailey examine the document people, their practices and some of the implications for privacy and identity.

[1] A device “in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” In 1945, Bush famously predicted the advent of this and various other technologies in an essay published in the Atlantic Monthly titled, “As We May Think”.
[2] A recording device that captures each ray of light that enters his retina.

Biography

Ian Kerr
Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law & Technology, University of Ottawa

As Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law, and Technology, Ian Kerr is Canada's leading authority on how ethical and legal and issues intersect with technology. Ian plays a significant role in the development of national and international model laws in e-commerce, privacy policy, digital copyright policy, and the delivery of government services online. He has advised various Canadian agencies on legal policy for online activities, and is a Canadian delegate to the United Nations' Special Working Group on e-Commerce, a project of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law. Ian is also a member of the Corporate/Commercial Law Group and acts as special counsel in technology law to Ottawa-based law firm Nelligan O'Brien Payne LLP.

Ian has published numerous articles and papers and has written, edited and contributed to several books and journals on various subjects including the philosophy of law, contract law, information ethics, internet law, automation and intelligent agent technology. In addition to his current work on online intermediaries, Ian is involved in an international, collaborative research project on anonymous communication and is writing a book on the legal and ethical implications of artificial intelligence, robotics and nanotechnology. Ian previously taught law, philosophy, and new media at the University of Western Ontario. He has won six awards and citations for his teaching. He now holds the Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law and Technology at the Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, where he has co-designed a new graduate program and is building Canada's first law and technology research laboratory, a facility that will support the work of two Canada Research Chairs and twenty researchers.

Jane Bailey
Assistant Professor, University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law

Jane Bailey joined the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa in 2002. She teaches regulation of Internet communications, civil procedure and contracts. Professor Bailey completed her LL.M. at the University of Toronto in 2002, supported by a Centre for Innovation Law and Policy scholarship and an Ontario Scholarship. She was a co-recipient of the Howland Prize for outstanding performance in the LL.M. programme. She served as a law clerk to the Honourable Mr. Justice John Sopinka at the Supreme Court of Canada. Before returning to legal studies, Professor Bailey practised law in Toronto with Torys, where she was an associate in the litigation department. Her litigation experience included acting on matters relating to unlawful search of political protesters, and to the application of existing laws governing hate speech to an Internet website.

Her primary areas of interest relate to the intersections between law, evolving technology and equity. Professor Bailey's LL.M. research related to the potential for regulation of Internet hate speech. Her ongoing research focuses on the impact of evolving technology on significant public commitments to equality rights, freedom of expression and multiculturalism, as well as the societal and cultural impact of the Internet and emerging forms of private technological control, particularly in relation to members of socially disadvantaged communities.

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