We have lots of anecdotes about the increasing use of surveillance in society post-9/11 and the increasing controversies and public policy fissures that surveillance is causing. Now, a group of researchers led by David Lyon at Queen's University will spend the next four years examining the implications of the increasing flow across international borders of ?personal data?, from telephone numbers and PINs to fingerprints and retinal scans. In Canada, we're deadling with the fact that if we fly on an international flight, some personal information is going to be passed on to U.S. authorites.
?Surveillance is not just something done to people by the government or the police: it?s also determined by how far the ordinary person is prepared to go along with it,? Lyon said in a Queen's University press release announcing the study. (The press release was prompted by the release of a $1.9-million federa research grant for this project.)
?Neither complacency on the one hand, nor paranoia on the other, is a very useful response. We?d like to generate some informed debate that will lead to increased awareness and positive change.?
I spoke briefly with Lyon about this earlier this week. Didn't have enough yet to fight for space in the Globe but it was an interesting conversation nonethless. Hope to put some working notes up here sooner than later.
Interestingly, an hour or two after that discussion, I recevied electronic notice of a conference to be held in April in Surrey, U.K. carrying the title: The Life of Mobile Data: Technology, Mobility and Data Subjectivity. Lyon, as it turns out, is to be a keynote speaker at this conference. Here's the conference description:

The rapid adoption and diffusion of mobile devices over the past decade has transformed the way information is generated, organized and communicated about individuals and their lives. The construction of new mobile data profiles and of mobile, informatic selves, hold the potential to transform what is organizationally and interpersonally meant by privacy, individuality, community, risk, trust, and reciprocity in a mobilizing, and globalizing world.
In order to examine these transformations, the RIS:OME project at the University of Surrey is hosting an international, interdisciplinary conference to address emerging social and cultural relations of mobility, privacy, identity, information and communication. This conference will bring together academic, industry and policy researchers and practitioners to critically address how mobile information and communications technologies structure relations of privacy, security, trust, power, identity and difference.