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Contributions describing the 15th Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy: Panopticon, covering selective highlights of papers, presentations and the overall context of this meeting.

Observations and descriptions of key themes and ideas that were presented in a conference framework.

Significant participation at this conference.

This is the primary forum for the exploration of issues and challenges relating to the internet and freedom today, focusing on the impact that emerging surveillance societies have on the net and individuals particularly in light of the data mining and data sharing of personal information, combined with and the close partnership between corporations and government.

How problems and issues are resolved by others and realizing that the power of sharing information is greatest when solutions are creative and openly shared.

Good to share information and network with colleagues on issues relating to privacy.

Organizations and their actors are increasingly using video surveillance to monitor organizational members, employees, clients, and customers. The use of such technologies in workplaces creates a virtual panopticon and increases uncertainty for those under surveillance. Video surveillance in organizations poses several concerns for the privacy of individuals and creates a security-privacy dilemma for organizations to address. The purpose of this paper is to offer a decision-making model that ties in ethical considerations of access, equality, and transparency at four stages of video surveillance use in organizations: deployment of cameras and equipment, capturing footage, processing and storing data, and editing and sharing video footage. At each stage, organizational actors should clearly identify the purpose for video surveillance, adopt a minimum capability necessary to achieve their goals, and communicate decisions made and actions taken that involve video surveillance in order to reduce uncertainty and address privacy concerns of those being surveilled.

The paper proposes a normative model for ethical video surveillance organizational decision making based on a review of relevant literature and recent events.

The paper provides several implications for the future of dealing with security-privacy dilemmas in organizations and offers structured considerations for corporation leaders and decision makers.

The paper includes implications for organizations to approach video surveillance with ethical considerations for stakeholder privacy while balancing security demands.

This paper offers a framework for decision-makers that also offers opportunities for further research around the concept of ethics in organizational video surveillance.

The chapter critically analyzes the concepts and the practices of surveillance in modern and postmodern societies along with their consequences. We show the changes in the systems, which are used to monitor individuals, and emphasize the transition toward soft surveillance systems, probably stimulated by digital technologies. This switch from top-down control to “lateral” monitoring systems encloses surveillance practices with suggestive names like interveillance, synopticon, and dataveillance. The dark side of digital health has a bright start. According to Topol’s (2016) vision of the future, we will soon be the “consumers,” the real protagonists, of the management of our health – thanks largely to the practically endless data about our bodies, behaviors, and lifestyles we will be able to collect and analyze. We will share our health information in real time with the doctors whom we will choose based on their score in clinical rankings (here, too, quantification rears its head). Yet, this simplified version of health makes it seem that there are always some solutions, which the algorithm can supply as long as it has enough information. Moreover, in the United States, some health-insurance companies have started to offer a discount on premiums to the members who agree to collect and share self-tracking data with them. Clearly, the discount is given only to the workers who have healthy habits. At first sight, this can seem as a win-win trade-off; however, what today is presented as an individual option can easily become a requirement tomorrow.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how surveillance facilitates new power relationships.

This longitudinal qualitative study is predicated on observations of the home care workers interacting with their managers and clients. The emerging picture was complemented with interviews of the participants. The home care workers were chosen as being crucial in the construction of new everyday relationships, and their interpretations were given most value in presenting how surveillance and monitoring relationships are constructed as embedded mundane practices and as emerging from practical needs.

The paper discusses an implementation and use case of surveillance capable technology in a social home care setting. The findings suggest discrepancy of how surveillance is being interpreted by different participants depending on their positioning in the context of use.

The study presents a case study where surveillance issues emerge not only at the workplace but also in the domestic sphere. The paper explores the workers' role in defining surveillance at the workplace, and questions the limits of legitimate surveillance in the social care context concerning vulnerable citizens as clients.

This article discusses the qualities of leadership and contrasts the role of a leader with that of a manger. It analyses the impact of the New Public Management (NPM) regime's performance management strand on leadership in the public sector. The achievement of targets is seen as a measure of political success and analysis is made of the manner in which this is reinforced throughout public organisations. The effects of ‘robust’ performance management techniques are examined and examples given of the negative impacts of quantitative targets. It is argued that the function of the leader is reduced to that of managing the attainment of these centrally set goals. As a result risk‐taking and innovation are constrained to that which is required for the achievement of these goals. This is seen as an explanation for the current prevalence of ‘gaming’ ploys and is linked to a drop‐in integrity in the pursuit of outputs. It is further argued that the target regime sees the ‘Sovietisation’ of the public sector and a return to the Taylorian values of an industrial past. A brief case study of social service provision illustrates the potential for negative outcomes that may result. This article concludes that when a ‘tick in the box’ is allowed to suffice the qualities of public sector leadership are inevitably reduced and confined to the panopticon of centralised targets.

This paper aims to depict how the state of inverted totalitarianism is emerging in post-postnormal times and illustrate how it shares many of the same features of the totalitarianism depicted in the novels Brave New World (A. Huxley) and 1984 (G. Orwell). It also shows how a “way forward” is possible through a paradigmatic reorientation of “well-being” and “happiness”.

The research is based on literature within the field of futures studies, as well as relevant sources outside the futures field. It applies R Slaughter’s critical futures and F Polak’s method of social critique and reconstruction in its analysis of the state of inverted totalitarianism in post postmodern times.

It finds that the technological society and the US empire (with its attendant corporatocracy, Panopticon and PAC man values) in post-postnormal times is drifting toward a state of inverted totalitarianism, which is remarkably beginning to resemble Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and G. Orwell’s 1984.

The research is an essay and conceptual paper, so it is limited by its conceptual, philosophical nature and the author’s interpretation of social phenomena. It could also include the latest research on the role that the manipulation of internet algorithms plays in the state of inverted totalitarianism. It could also include more reconstructive details.

Sheer consciousness of the state of inverted totalitarianism and the need for social reconstruction should lead to a reevaluation of the meaning of the good society and how to realize it.

Social critique and reconstruction are essential to the survival of any given society or civilization, as the groundwork for the emergence of wise foresight. The creative minority of a civilization must understand its predicament, the nature of its civilizational crisis, before it can even begin to understand and meet the challenge of the future.

The paper presents post-postnormal times as the back drop through which a state of inverted totalitarianism is emerging – a social dystopia that resembles the dystopias depicted in the novels, Brave New World and 1984. Inverted totalitarianism is shown to be an outgrowth of the technological society and the American empire (a corporatocracy and Panopticon increasingly global in nature). Freedom from this emerging totalitarianism begins with the realization of its existence and its given assumptions about the meaning of life and the pursuit of happiness. The paper also posits social critique and reconstruction (as well as critical futures) as a fundamental method to deconstruct and reconstruct the paradigm that supports inverted totalitarianism.