Doctoral Dissertation Research: “Sound and Surveillance: Recording and Privacy in the 21st Century”

In the past decade, major tech companies shared their commitment to the privacy of their users. These pledges were made to address growing concerns from the public about the surveillance capabilities of private companies and their impact on privacy, agency, and sovereignty. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the purpose of this study is to (1) investigate the data-gathering practices of tech companies in the U.S., (2) examines the ways in which users and privacy advocates have contested or resisted forms of surveillance, and (3) analyze the justifications of private corporations in their attempts to build a world in which everything and everyone is being constantly recorded. This research is centered on non-creative recording practices, investigating the recording and listening capacities of everyday technological devices, as well as their impact on citizens. The first case study is on the so-called “Smart Cities”—the connected city of “the future,” according to tech companies involved in urbanism—that gathers massive amounts of data on citizens in their daily lives. The second case study is on “Smart Home” device Amazon Echo, equipped with a voice assistant named “Alexa.” Devices such as Echo are constantly “on” and listening, gathering sonic data from users through opaque practices.

This project treats policy, legal texts such as terms of use, marketing discourses, and discourses in the media and on social media as ethnographic data. In addition, it uses traditional fieldwork methods such as interviews and participant observation conducted in non-profit organizations, at conferences, and in public spaces, primarily in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. The ethnographic work gathers qualitative data on three main points of view: those of privacy advocates, tech company workers, and “users” of technology. The aim is to observe and inquire about the way people conceive of and build the technology, how people interact with it, and the impact of these interactions on notions of privacy. This project seeks to bring competing viewpoints together, thereby resisting current contemporary tendencies towards polarization, and provides relevant analysis of the main constituencies involved in the privacy wars. By looking at privacy as a complex, nonhegemonic concept, and interrogating the very notion of the boundary between the public and the private, this work can serve to inform policy that strikes a balance between individual freedom and the public good.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.