In this reading, Kelly Gates talks about the difference between visual surveillance and what she calls “dataveillance” which was really interesting to me. A question I have always had in terms of the data that is taken by the many social media apps is how much can you really tell about the user. If you allow an app to use your location services it can tell where you are logging in and since you are already on the app it can tell when you are logging into the app. With access to information like this a person can tell at what time in the day a user uses an app and where you use it the most and can use this to calculate the probability of you being at a location and on your phone. This is a scary thing when you see how easy it is to calculate it once you gain access to the data. The security of this data is the thing that must be checked the most often and updated. When this data is sold to other companies it loses the responsibility to the users of safeguarding the data in exchange of user engagement.
