Article

Environment and Planning D: Society and

Spatial big data and Space
2015, Vol. 33(6) 965984
anxieties of control ! The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0263775815595814
Agnieszka Leszczynski epd.sagepub.com
School of Environment, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract
Kate Crawford has recently suggested that the everyday lived experience of big data is one of
surveillant anxiety: the fear that the personal information that individuals disclose about
themselves and that others generate about them is intercepted and analyzed by the intelligence
services within emergent praxes of pervasive dataveillance. I empirically assess this notion of
surveillant anxiety in the context of spatial big data. Drawing on the results of a small-scale
survey of understandings of location data collection and dissemination via mobile devices and
their contextualization against other available data, I demonstrate that individuals are seemingly
more concerned with transparency in data collection and in controlling flows of personal spatial
information about themselves than they are with practices of data capture or their eventual
use(s). Rather than a generalizable societal condition of surveillant anxiety, I argue that the
realities of living in a (spatial) big data present are better characterized in terms of what I designate
as anxieties of control: the desire to discern (be aware of) and direct (determine the
disclosure of) personal spatial big data flows about oneself while feeling that any attempt at
exerting such control is effectively futile.

Keywords
Big data, location, surveillance, anxiety, control

Introduction
The disclosures made public by the release of classied intelligence documents by Edward
Snowden beginning in June 2013 are revelatory of the ways in which emergent regimes of
state-sponsored surveillance are crystallizing around big data. The publication of these les
in leading global press media outlets has informed the public of the extent to which the
securities services of the Five Eyes alliance1 are organizing a series of signals intelligence
activities predicated on the mining, interception, and analytics of vast swaths of personal
data. A recent Pew study found that only 6% of Americans surveyed had not heard anything
about data-centric signals intelligence programs involving practices such as the ubiquitous
sweep of communications metadata and the monitoring of internet use (Shelton et al., 2015).
In light of broad public awareness of these practices, individuals must reconcile with

Corresponding author:
Agnieszka Leszczynski, School of Environment, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland 1142, New Zealand.
Email: agnieszka.leszczynski@auckland.ac.nz
966 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(6)

processes of data-gathering, data-processing and organizational [and individual]

adjustment as facts of everyday life2 (Couldry and Powell, 2014: 1).
Yet, how individuals actually come to terms with these facts remains unexamined. As
Taylor et al. (2014: 1) impress upon us, while the abundance of stories predicting a
surveillance society is not unwarranted, they tell us very little about how ordinary folk
make sense of data (Taylor et al., 2014: 1). In this vein, Kate Crawford (2014) has recently
posed the question, What does the lived reality of big data feel like? (emphasis in original).
She argues that the everyday experience of big data is one of surveillant anxiety: the worry
that the digital selves constructed through practices of data dis/assembly across data ows
disclose things about individuals that they have not willingly divulged themselves, and that
these disclosures are inaccurate and/or too abstract, failing to account for the complexity of
identity and quotidian identity performance. Surveillant anxiety in this formulation is a
generalized societal response to the sweeping reconguration of privacy underwritten by
aforementioned public revelations about the nature, scope, scale, and reach of the
activities of the securities agencies and the emergent cloudindustrialmilitarysurveillance
complex that lives o of the capture, appropriation, and analytics of data fumes.3
This narrative of surveillant anxiety is, however, highly speculative. At present, it lacks
empirical substantiation of whether public knowledge of the fact that data about individuals
are continuously being generated, shared, captured, and repurposed by myriad actors is
associated with apprehension about the implications of privacy erosion resulting from
emergent practices of dataveillance.4 In other words, it remains to be asked: if
surveillance anxiety may be evidenced, how does it manifest in terms of a material reality
of living in a big data present? To date, the majority of empirical research has assessed users
perceptions of and behavioral responses to the loss of privacy vis-a-vis smartphones and
mobile applications that act as data collection and tracking devices (see, e.g., Lin et al., 2012;
Ricker et al., 2014; Shelton et al., 2015; Shklovski et al., 2014). What is yet to be ascertained
is how persons may actually be coming to terms with being abstracted into data ows and
how they may be reconciling with the potential consequences of the circulation of highly
personal information about themselves. In this paper, I work to empirically assess the extent
to which surveillant anxiety meaningfully describes living under conditions of pervasive
dataveillance in the context of locational data collection, tracking, and disclosure through
networked information communication technologies (ICTs). I foreground spatial big data
productions because in comparison to other kinds of personally identifying information
(PII), the collection and disclosure of an individuals locational data are uniquely
pervasive (continuous), platform independent (collection and disclosure of locational
information are not particular to any one application, but is rather implicated in digital
practices across an array of mobile services, nor is it specic to any one device or mobile
operating system), and indiscriminate (implicates anyone who owns a mobile device rather
than being dependent on voluntary participation on designated platforms). The result of
pervasive, extensive, and continuous practices of geosurveillance (Kitchin, 2014a) is that
personal locational disclosures cannot be directly or easily controlled by individuals through
adjustments to settings on any one device or within any one application or service (see also
Ricker et al., 2014).
The complexity of controlling or delimiting the context of the ow of spatial big data
about oneself is signicant, given the ways in which locational information is uniquely
sensitive in terms of the kinds of personal details that it reveals, how such disclosures are
made, and the ways in which this positional data may be enrolled as evidence of individual
complicity and participation in specic (anti)social behaviors, events, and practices.
The characteristics that make personal locational information uniquely sensitive render
Leszczynski 967

spatial big data particularly valuable to corporate entities, law enforcement, and the
securities agencies. While it is dicult to meaningfully separate state from corporate
practices of data production, capture, repurposing, and correlation through analytics
(see Brown, 2013), I give analytical precedence to the state for two important reasons.
First, state dataveillance practices increasingly depend on data produced and stored by
corporate entities and/or generated through quotidian uses of their products (applications,
services, and devices). The securities agencies procure these data through legal requests
served to private enterprises such as data rms, interception of this data (tapping of ber-
optic cables, but also through piggybacking o of mobile and Internet cookies and
mandating spyware be built into hardware), and via attempts at breaking encryption
rmware.5 The nature of this relationship, however, is not reciprocal (i.e., does not ow
from the state to corporate entities). Second, while corporate practices of big data
production and analytics have not gone unreported, the piecemeal media coverage of
corporate data-driven surveillance pales in comparison to the concerted, longitudinal, and
consistent traction that the Snowden revelations have had and continue to have in the press.
As such, if anxieties around surveillance are born of public knowledge of big data practices
to track and digitally dis/assemble individuals as per Crawford (2014), then the anxieties to
which she refers, where they may be evidenced to arise, likely do so from public knowledge
of state surveillance activities rather than that of corporate actors.
As locational information is coming to gure centrally within the securities agencies
emergent surveillance rationalities, it represents an ideal context for empirically examining
whether individuals connect (spatial) big data productions about themselves to the
dataveillance practices of the intelligence services. In this paper, I empirically assess the
notion of surveillant anxiety by synthesizing the results of several publicly available
polls and surveys gauging public responses to locational tracking and data collection.
Against this background, I present the results of a small-scale pilot study I conducted
gauging individuals perceptions of and quotidian practices around the tracking and
disclosure of their locational information through mobile devices. Respondents to myriad
surveys do express a general level of concern about the ubiquitous sweep of personal
locational information enabled by app, services, and devices. However, these concerns,
rather than being articulated in terms of the uses of the data within analytics regimes tend
instead to be application (app) and device specic. I argue that surveillant anxiety may not
be discerned on the basis of empirical evidence as a generalized societal condition in
Crawfords (2014) formulation of pervasive apprehension about the operationalization of
personal locational data to structure individuals daily lives by positioning them as spatially
vulnerable in particular ways. However, the stark realities of the pervasive generation,
collection, capture, and repurposing of personal (locational) data via largely mobile
digital platforms and devices do provoke highly individualized anxieties of controlof
individuals desiring to determine and direct the ow of personal locational data about
themselves while simultaneously realizing that any attempt to exert such control is
eectively futile.

(Spatial) big data and state surveillance

Data sociologists and others have stressed that big data designates more than simply large
data sets that may be characterized in terms of tried descriptors of volume, variety, and
velocity. For Crawford and Schultz (2014), big data is rst and foremost a practice of data
generation through the establishment of correlations across data ows. As a function of the
relational nature of data (boyd and Crawford, 2012), big data is a process of generating
968 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(6)

more information beyond that contained within piecemeal data themselves by forming
linkages between data events. This has consequences not only for privacy but also
governance, with increasing attention being given to the ways in which big data signies
pronounced changes in the status and function of information in society. Emergent modes of
governance predicated on the securitization of everyday life are part and parcel of broader
trends toward the algorithmic management of persons, places, and behaviors through data
practices such as predictive analytics (Couldry and Powell, 2014; Crampton, 2014; Kitchin,
2014a, 2014b; Kitchin and Lauriault, 2014; Klauser and Albrechtslund, 2014; Lyon, 2014).
Abilities to algorithmically discern, address, and shape ever more intimate aspects of daily
life depend on the availability of vast, continuous reams of highly personal data that
represent a near real-time snapshot of an individuals movements, activities at specic
locations, relationships and aliations, political beliefs, and even mood (sentiment).
Of the kinds of personal information that are generated, intercepted, and appropriated by
the securities services, personal locational data are one of the most sought after. The
Snowden les extensively evidence this. 2010 documents reveal that the National Security
Agency (NSA) and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) exploit
weaknesses in leaky mobile social and gaming applications that veil secondary data
mining operations behind primary interfaces, piggybacking o of commercial data
collection by syphoning up personal information including contacts (social graph), device
information, age of users, and location (Ball, 2014; Glanz et al., 2014; Soltani and Gellman,
2013a; Soltani et al., 2013; Yadron, 2014). Here, the national securities services intercept
personal data in real time, using this data to actively track users under a signals intelligence
program code named Tracker Smurf after the childrens animated classic (Ball, 2014). In a
series of GCHQ-produced slides (also 2010), the agency highlights that at the time, there
were over 200 third-party location aware apps available for the iPhone alone.6 The so-
called Mobile Applications Project detailed in these documents aimed to provide target-
centric converged analysis of voice, text, and location data. In a set of complementary slides
produced by the NSA, emphasis is likewise given to capturing and processing locational data
emanating from mobile devices.7 Specically, the slides stress the ways in which locational
data oozing from both apps and devices can be used to track persons of interest and in doing
so allow analysts to answer the question, Where is the target? It points out that Android
devices pass GPS data in the clear and gives prominence to mining geodata from raw
geotags, specically that embedded as metadata in natively geotagged photos uploaded to
social photo-sharing sites online. A perfect scenario is identied as consisting of a [t]arget
uploading photo [sic] to a social media site taken with a mobile device. As GPS traces are
sent to both carriers/network providers (stored on their servers) and towers/receivers, the
agency proclaims the resulting ability to geo[locate] phones from virtually anywhere.
These two documents reveal that the mining and capture of locational data are not
incidental to the capture of other personal information. Rather, the emphasis given to
geo identies location to be one of the direct, primary objectives of data interception
because of the kinds of questions it allows the agencies to answer, for example, Where
was my target when they did this? and Where is my target going? (Glanz et al., 2014).
Soltani and Gellman (2013a) have identied at least 10 American signals intelligence
programs (or SIGADS; Signals Intelligence Activity Designators) that explicitly sweep up
location data. Under the auspices of a SIGAD-designated HAPPYFOOT, the NSA taps
directly into mobile app data trac that streams smartphone locations to location-based
advertising networks organized around the delivery of proximately relevant mobile ads
(Soltani and Gellman, 2013a). This locational data, which is often determined through
mobile device GPS capabilities, are far higher resolution than network location, allowing
Leszczynski 969

the NSA to map Internet addresses to physical locations more precisely than is possible
with traditional Internet geolocation services (Soltani et al., 2013).
The utility of intercepting real-time ows of personal locational data is not simply that it
allows for the tracking of known persons/persons of interest, but it is furthermore central to
target development. The NSA analytics suite CO-TRAVELER consists of a myriad of
analysis techniques for bulk processing cellular network location data, of which the NSA
collects ve billion records a day8 worldwide (Soltani and Gellman, 2013a, 2013b). The
objective of these analytics tools is to identify (new) targets for surveillance based on
location behaviors they exhibit, regardless of whether or not they were previously a
suspect (Soltani and Gellman, 2013a, no page). This analytics suite has been designated
co-traveller because it allows for the identication of co-presenceindividuals who may
be shown, by virtue of their mobile position, as being within the vicinity of an existing target,
particularly if the sweep of data reveals that their mobiles have pinged of more than one of
the same locations as that of an existing target. This may be seen as suspicious and reason
enough to enroll this co-traveler as a surveillance target in their own right. This approach
to target development, only possible given the indiscriminate sweep of personal locational
data, is premised on incidental data capture of potentially all individuals, not only foreign
nationals and/or suspects abroad but also citizens domestically.
In a related practice, through a SIGAD code named LEVITATION, the Canadian
Communications Security Establishment (CSE) intercepts data cable trac to monitor up
to 15 million le downloads a day in an attempt to identify political and religious extremists
and potential terrorists (Gallagher and Greenwald, 2015; Hildebrandt et al., 2015). This is
informed by a hypothesis that (potential) extremists may be located (or identied as having
been present at a particular location at the time of upload/download) on the basis of global
IP addresses. Particularly signicant in this CSE document,9 marked as shareable with other
Five Eyes members, is that the CSE explicitly states that it is looking to location data to
improve LEVITATION capabilities for intercepting both GPS waypoints and [d]evices
close to places so as to further isolate and develop surveillance targets, including those
carrying and using devices within proximity of designated locations. Several months prior,
the CSE was also revealed to have been tracking the locations of both Canadians and foreign
travelers via Wi-Fi at major Canadian airports for up to two weeks after passing through the
airports and subsequent nodes including other airports, urban Wi-Fi hotspots, transport
hubs, major hotels and conference centers, and even public libraries both within Canada and
abroad (Weston et al., 2014).10 The documents indicate that this program represents a new
analytics approach to detecting erratic or anomalous spatial behavior based on registered
locational signals and the tracking of both known and potential targets across international
borders (Weston et al., 2014).
The value of location in personal data ows is not simply that it designates position or
proximity. What makes spatial meta/data of particular interest to the securities apparatuses
is that these data are not standalone locational data events, but are rather spatiotemporal and
spatialrelational in nature. In other words, what is important about the coincidence of time
and location is that it allows for the monitoring of not only individuals positions but also
their movements (Kitchin, 2014a). Equally importantly, individuals movements and
behaviors in, through, and across space may subsequently be correlated with known or
inferred aliations, sentiments, and political associations.
These practices of the indiscriminate capture, interception, and mining of spatiotemporal/
spatialrelational data such as that evidenced in the select activities of the Five Eyes
securities agencies proled above are signicant in that they extend potentials for making
persons spatially vulnerable in dierent ways. For example, if an individuals mobile device
970 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(6)

pings o of the same cell towers in the same succession as that as a known target of
surveillance, do they become designated a co-traveler? Is this data further correlated
with other variables such as gender, race, ethnic background, and religious aliation,
which position certain kinds of bodies as more likely to be ensnared within the location-
tracking dragnet? If an individual frequently connecting from Canadian airports
demonstrates a pattern of taking longer than average to transit through the spaces of
these transit hubs, and moves on to stay in hotels in specied parts of the world, does
this likewise render them a developable target for continuous locational and behavioral
monitoring and surveillance? How it is that location (both spatiotemporal and spatial
relational data) comes to actually enter into ows of intimate, revealing information about
individuals is the subject of the next section.

Location in personal big data flows

Mobile devices including both GPS-enabled smartphones and cellular phones without
Internet capabilities have been pervasivelly adopted across developed and developing
economies. These devices both collect and leave traces of their users presences in specic
places at specic times. In the aggregate, these data may be used to reconstruct individual
spatial histories, predict future spatial trajectories, and determine copresence with others
based on correlations across locational content streams (de Montjoye et al., 2013; Soltani
and Gelman, 2013a). Mobile phones continuously ping o of cell towers as they are
transported across the global cellular network grid, registering as time-stamped point
locations held in databases by service providers (Cvrcek et al., 2006). Smartphones carry
with them even more possibilities for having their locations recorded by corresponding
sensors ubiquitously distributed throughout urban environments. The native GPS
aordances of smartphones mean that the locations of these devices can be pinpointed
with a very high degree of accuracy. When the Wi-Fi functionality on a smartphone is
enabled, the device continuously searches for networks to join, with the router or Wi-Fi
mast emulator11 (fake network access point) registering the devices presence when it comes
within range of the sensor. Smartphones log these points of access in a le storing this time-
stamped locational data within the mobile operating system itself. This locational cache is
used to optimize locational services on the devices so as to reduce demand on the battery as
GPS triangulation is more energy demanding than determining position on the basis of
locational cache data. Elsewhere, Apple has developed a precision locational awareness
sytem called iBeacon, which uses sensors that exploit Bluetooth wireless technology to
determine the position of nearby smartphones to within mere inches away from a
transmitter (Hern, 2014; McFarland, 2014). Yet even were an individual to disable all of
these signaling/receiving functionalities (GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth), the power usage record of
their device would be sucient to act as a locational proxy, as power usage increases with
distance from a cell tower (Kleinman, 2015). This precludes possibilities for moving
o-grid, particularly in urban environments densely populated with seamlessly
embedded sensor technologies with which networked devices communicate (Kitchin,
2014b). Even with foregoing all forms of digitally mediated communication, an
unfeasibility of living in connected societies, individuals can be identied, tracked, and
monitored through myriad other surveillance systems such as urban CCTV networks.
In addition to the ways in which networked devices leave locational traces by registering
against embedded sensor technologies, the applications that run on these devices leverage
their locational awareness to underwrite an ever-expanding array of services that mine
location in addition to other kinds of personal information. Where platforms are explicity
Leszczynski 971

location oriented or enable some degree of intractivity on the basis of real-time position,
individuals may be involved in generating locational information about themselves through,
for example, enabling the automated geotagging of content shared across social platforms
(such as geocoded Tweets and Instagrams), using navigation services such as Waze that
collect user mobility data to inform the picture of the real-time trac patterns and route
users around zones of congestion, or using explicitly geosocial services such as Swarm and
Highlight that continuosly harness the locational aordances of smartphones so as to foster
interaction with content or other users. The networked nature of social and mobile platforms
enables not only the voluntary generation of personal locational information about oneself
but also allows people to share information about others (Marwick and boyd, 2014; Ricker
et al., 2014).
As per Ricker et al. (2014), the collection of locational data and its subsequent disclosure
to other parties is an interceonnected cyclical process making it dicult to distinguish when
and where each act [of data collection, disclosure, access, etc.] begins and ends (no page).
The networked ecology of big data productions means that user-generated locational
informationwhether about oneself or about othersis easily repurposed by third parties
that tap into these data ows beyond the platforms of native information contribution. Yet
the amount of locational information that users freely generate about themselves or others
pales in comparison to the volumes of locational data generated or captured about them
by myriad sensors, their devices themselves, and, most notably, corporate entities
(The White House, 2014a: 2). This includes the logging of personal positional data
through apps where location is entirely peripheral to the purpose of the service. Twitter
for instance accesses mobile device location so as to autogeotag Tweets where users have
enabled this feature; here, location is central to the functionality of this aordance of the
application. In contrast, for music services such as Pandora that access the locational utilities
of the devices on which they are deployed, location is not necessary to the functionality of
the platform in any way.

Networked ecologies of location, disclosure, and privacy

The select though by no means exhaustive examples of locational data generation and
capture proled above are presented as a means of accounting for the various ways in
which personal positional information enters into big data ows. They furthermore speak
to the complexity of locational data capture, disclosure, and repurposing that occurs as a
result of the pervasive adoption of mobiles and of the applications and services that run on
these devices. This complexity renders establishing control over the capture, registry, and
dissemination of personal positional data extremely dicult. This is not unique to locational
data per se, but is rather a feature of what Marwick and boyd (2014) characterize as
networked information ecologies typied by the circulation, repurposing, disclosure, and
dissemination of personal information beyond native platforms, devices, and data stores.
Nissenbaum (2010) discusses this in terms of the collapse of contextual integrity, dened as
the ability of individuals to dene the circumstances under which they deem the ow
(disclosure, repurposing, etc.) of their personal information appropriate; this varies with
context, depending on who is at the receiving end of this information. Within this
emergent big data ecology, where stores of data often concern multiple individuals,
personal control over information is technically impractical (The White House,
2014a: 9). Enacting control over personal data ows, then, is not a question of designing
appropriate aordances into individual technologies. Where extant, these tend to be
overwhelmingly binaristic, opt-in/opt-out solutions that aord users little control
972 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(6)

beyond blanket privacy or total publicity (Elwood and Leszczynski, 2011; Marwick, 2013b).
Even where engineered into platforms, these mechanisms are failure prone, as evidenced by
highly publicized security breaches aecting multiple services and operating systems.12
Moreover, these mechanisms tend to be platform specic, meaning that individuals may
only (attempt to) control the ow of their locational information at the level of individual
devices, applications, and services.
While most privacy violations are still experienced as being highly individual (see Solove,
2006 for a taxonomy), privacy itself is being relocated beyond the individual to the level of
the network (Marwick and boyd, 2014). This means that individual senses of privacy harm,
where experienced, are intimately bound up with the interconnected, interoperable, and
relational nature of devices and data that make the establishment of correlations across
information ows central to big data practices possible. It is not only the integrity of
information disclosure that is collapsed in a networked data ecology. In a data-driven
age where sexual orientation may be discerned on the basis of patterns in the kinds of ads
that an individual clicks on within Facebook13 rather than personal disclosure, the material,
and metaphorical separation between the self, the state, and society that Cohen (2012)
argues is essential for the kinds of identity formation and freedom of expression on which
the functioning of democracy depends is likewise narrowed and/or eliminated. In this rapidly
changing privacy context, individuals work to exercise control over personal data ows in an
attempt to mediate, and maintain the integrity of, disclosure. Big data implicate privacy
violations around disclosure because despite of their fragmented, piecemeal nature, their
inherent relationality allows for more information than that contained within any one data
event to be generated through the establishment of correlations across data streams through
analytics (boyd and Crawford, 2012; Crawford and Schultz, 2014).
Much of the research about how individuals work to negotiate privacy in this networked
context has focused on strategies enacted vis-a-vis dominant social platforms such as
Facebook and Twitter (see, e.g., boyd, 2014; Marwick, 2013a; Marwick and boyd, 2014;
Shelton et al., 2015). This is reasonable, given that digital practices tend to coalesce around
populist platforms and services, and network eects make dislodging dominant platforms
dicult (Graham and Shaw, 2015). But because the capture of personal locational data is
comparatively more complex and occurs across a variegated array of contexts, the
identication and development of practices meant to control how individual locational
information is abstracted into spatial big data ows is comparatively much more dicult.
The irreducibility of personal locational data ows to singular or unique devices, platforms,
applications, services, or situational contexts complicates the fashioning of practices and
devising of strategies for concealing, obscuring, or avoiding leaving behind locational traces.
The complexity of locational information generation, capture, disclosure, and
repurposing does not, however, correspond to a lack of awareness on the part of
individuals about spatial data generation, collection, and repurposing. Participants in a
recent study evaluating how mobile users value their PII identied location as the most
sensitive and valued form of PII (Staiano et al., 2014). This echoes the results of a UK
study in which respondents (n 1254) identied location as being one of the forms of PII
that they were least willing to share with mobile apps (TRUSTe Inc., 2013). Whereas, over
30% of participants identied that they would consent to share their gender, email address,
and full name with mobile applications, only eight would grant an app permission to access
their devices location utilities. Elsewhere, 52% of respondents (n 1500) to a survey
commissioned by Microsoft (2011) across ve countries14 expressed strong concern with
having their locational information shared with other persons and/or corporate
organizations. While generally respondents indicated being more concerned with their
Leszczynski 973

locational data being disclosed to organizations than other individuals (Microsoft, 2011), a
2010 Webroot survey of 1500 Americans using social media on mobile devices found that
concerns about other persons having access to personal locational information are
nevertheless very real: 32% of males and 59% of female respondents expressed being
very worried about the potentials of their locational information being used by another
individual to stalk them (Sass, 2010).
User awareness of the collection and disclosure of personal locational data may also be
evidenced in practices and activities enacted around applications as well as the mobile
devices on which they run. According to the most recent Pew report on location-based
services (Zickuhr, 2013), 35% of US adult smartphone owners reported having at one
point or another turned o location-tracking features on their mobile device as a result of
privacy concerns. Similarly, 46% of American teenaged mobile app users indicated having at
some instance turned o the location tracking feature either of their device or within a
specic app (Madden et al., 2013). In the aggregate, the results of these studies evidence
sensitivity to locational privacy15 as a present concern among a noninsignicant proportion
of mobile device users. The question that remains, however, is whether these concerns with
locational privacy are indicative of surveillant anxiety as a generalized societal response to
state-sponsored and enacted (geo)surveillance.

Small data on spatial big data

In the autumn of 2013, I conducted a small-scale pilot study assessing understandings of and
behaviors around mobile locational privacy among students at Queens University, where
I was aliated as a researcher. Queens University is located in Canada, a Five Eyes
member state.16 The study consisted of a web-based survey comprised of 30 multiple
choice questions and one open-ended question asking students to self-report their area of
study. The survey was open between the end of September, 2013, and 15 February, 2014,
with 84 students participating in the survey during this time. Students were recruited through
email sent out by instructors actively teaching courses across the university. Students who
provided an indication of their level of study indicated majoring across a range of science,
social science, and ne arts/humanities disciplines. Geography however gured as the subject
of study with the highest frequency of respondents (38.7% of participants who provided a
response to this question).
The study targeted university students as research subjects because they constitute a
spatially concentrated and thereby conveniently recruitable cohort of individuals
belonging to the primary demographic of young adults (aged 1829) among whom the
adoption and use of location-based services is highest (Zickuhr and Smith, 2010). This
nds correspondence within available statistics on digitally mediated communication
practices by lifestage. Save for email, students lead in all categories of ICT use including
sharing photos online, posting messages, and being active on social media (Brown, 2013).
Students as a cohort are more willing to share information about themselves via these digital
channels, meaning that practices of digital disclosure are only likely to increase as these
individuals move through subsequent lifestages (Brown, 2013). Although the survey was
open to all students (including mature students), all respondents were between the ages of
18 and 29 (leading demographic).
The survey assessed both concerns with locational privacy and practices of mediating
the collection, disclosure, interception, and/or repurposing of personal location data.
The results of this survey, while not broadly generalizable beyond the student cohort,
nevertheless advance the line of empirical inquiry beyond research-to-date gauging the
974 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(6)

presence/absence of locational privacy concern by examining the possible origins of these

concerns and the contexts in which they are articulated and negotiated. The perceptions
reported hold true at a certain point in time, and are likely to shift with experience,
technology, and its adoption, as well as with lifestage. Despite being partial, the results of
the survey speak to the experience of spatial big data ows in the spaces and practices of
everyday life in two particularly illuminating respects. The rst concerns user-reported
locational data practices as enacted vis-a-vis mobile devices and applications; the second
involves user sentiments regarding locational data disclosure.
Notably, respondents indicated a general level of concern around mobile-networked
devices and personal locational information capture and disclosure, consistent with the
broad level of societal concern with locational privacy evidenced in survey data presented
in the previous section. The majority of respondents (68.8%) reported that they paid
attention to whether an application requests access to their devices locational capabilities
when installing new applications on their mobiles. While not in the majority, nearly 43%
similarly indicated having not installed an app or terminated an installation process
underway because it requested access to their locational data/capabilities of their device,
and/or deleting an app post installation because they were not comfortable with the way in
which it accessed the locational aordances of their devices, such as GPS (nearly 41%).
This awareness of the locational functionalities of devices was further evident in behaviors
around these aordances. Well over half of the respondents (51.9%) indicated actively
adjusting the GPS functionality on their mobile device, intentionally enabling it at times
and disabling it at others, though perhaps sometimes forgetting to turn it o even when they
would have potentially liked to have done so (an additional 10.4% of respondents). Of the
combined 62.3% who did take conscious action to enable/disable GPS functionality on their
device, when asked for their reasons for doing so, the most popular reason identied
(categories nonexclusive) was not wanting the applications running on their device having
access to their precise positional data (Figure 1). Although saving battery power likewise
gured comparatively high as an explanation of GPS regulation (enablement/disablement),
what is particularly revelatory is that while respondents reported being strongly concerned
about mobile applications having access to their devices location, they indicated being
relatively unconcerned with their mobile service/network providers having similar access
to their positional data. When asked to further specify the degree to which they were
concerned with companies (such as their carrier or network provider) having access to
their mobile devices locational data, the vast share of those surveyed reported being
largely unconcerned (Figure 2).
This sentiment is echoed in the overall lack of concern with data disclosure beyond the
provider (Figure 2). When asked how concerned they were about the possibility of their
carrier or network provider passing over their locational data to law enforcement,
respondents indicated being emphatically unconcerned with data-sharing practices in which
carriers and network provider are required by law to retain communications metadata
(including location) and regularly pass this information on to law enforcement and
intelligence agencies. A full third (33%) indicated being not at all concerned. This is
signicant because it reveals there to be a disconnect between generalized concerns about
locational data privacy and any subsequent uses of these data. The concerns with locational
data capture as expressed by respondents to the Queens University survey are
overwhelmingly application and device specic and do not extend to concerns with data
disclosure practices beyond mobile applications, services, and devices that capture, collect,
and use this information. More specically, the articulation of locational privacy concerns is
Leszczynski 975

70 68.8%
66.7%

60

50

40

31.3% 31.33%
30

20

10
6.2%

0
I am trying to I do not want I do not want I am worried Other.
save battery the applications my cell phone about my
power. on my device to carrier/network location being
have access to provider having tracked.
have access to access to my
my exact exact location.
location.

Figure 1. When you intentionally disable (turn off) the GPS on your mobile device, what are your reasons
for doing so?

not an expression of concern with intelligence and law enforcement agencies gaining access
to this data and actively enrolling it within analytics approaches to geosurveillance.

Questioning surveillant anxiety

The device and application-centric nature of (spatial) data privacy concerns in the responses
to the Queens University is paralleled elsewhere. Lin et al. (2012) determined that users
regulate locational settings at the level of applications and services largely to preempt
receiving location-based mobile ads rather than as a concerted strategy enacted to evade
surveillance. Elsewhere, Shklovski et al. (2014) found that users experienced privacy
violations when made aware that applications were accessing data on their smartphones
without their consent or prior knowledge, as opposed to when being made aware of those
data uses. A total of 71.4% of participants in the Queens University survey indicated that
they would be upset upon discovery that an app had been accessing and collecting their
spatial data without having asked for permission in advance.
976 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(6)

35
concern with
network providers
30
Percentage of Respondents

having access

25

15
concern with data being
passed to law enforccement
and government ag encies

1 2 3 4 5
not at all somewhat very
concerned concerned concerned

Figure 2. Degree of concern with select entities having access to personal locational data collected via
mobile devices.

In a study of locational privacy conducted by Ricker et al. (2014), the researchers indicate
that users are generally aware that governments [and] unwanted watchers . . . have the
ability to infringe on their privacy through the use of other smartphone services
(no page). Yet, while awareness of such practices is high, a very low proportion (only
25%) of participants feared the government actually possessed their locational
information (Ricker et al., 2014). Americans privacy strategies post-Snowden reported on
by the Pew are similarly indicative of broad ambiguity, rather than generalizable societal
anxiety, regarding government dataveillance practices (Shelton et al., 2015). This is
discernible in the degree of concern reported with regard to government monitoring of
data and electronic communications. When asked broadly about their level of concern
with such practices, the large share of respondents indicated being either somewhat (35%)
or not very (22%) concerned with such practices (Shelton et al., 2015). When prompted
with more specicity about particular dataveillance practices, such as state monitoring of
email, social media, and mobile apps, expressions of concern were even more subdued, with
only 29% of participants responding that they were either very or somewhat concerned
with government surveillance of their own personal mobile application data and use (Shelton
et al., 2015). At the level of applications and devices, however, there is evidence of
heightened concern: 39% of Americans surveyed reported that they never (11%) or
hardly ever (28%) allowed mobile apps to access their location.
This apparent disconnect between general ambiguity around state dataveillance practices
on the one hand, and stronger sentiments around spatial data privacy at the level of
applications and devices on the other may be contextualized vis-a-vis the results of a
public survey conducted as part of the 90-day review of big data and privacy
Leszczynski 977

commissioned by President Obama in 2014 (The White House, 2014b). Respondents

identied the American intelligence establishment and law enforcement agencies as the
least trustworthy of entities, including academia and business, which collect and leverage
big data within analytics (The White House, 2014b). While the majority of those surveyed
did indicate that they are concerned about the collection of their locational data (58%
reporting being very concerned), the sweep of location data was selected as the least
concerning among data capture, handling, and analytics practices (The White House,
2014b).17 Rather than the reality that locational data are being collected, the results of
the White House survey (2014b) instead indicate that individuals are most immediately
concerned with transparency in data collectionwith being informed about the kinds of
information being collected and by whom more so than the reality of this data being used
after the fact. This emphasis on transparency likewise gures prominently in aggregate
responses to a location-based services perception study commissioned by Microsoft
(2011), wherein the clear majority expressed a strong desire to control who has access to
their data, stating that the ability to control the ow of their locational information would
make them more comfortable with data disclosure.
Commensurate with transparency concerns, individuals seemingly express far more
interest in controlling the ow of information about themselves than with enacting what
Heuer and Tranberg (2014) term data obscurity, i.e., strategies of modifying or adjusting
behaviors around digital technologies for the express purpose of gaining anonymity or
becoming indistinct within data ows. Empirical trends in the studies presented herein
throw the notion of surveillant anxiety in Crawfords formulation as a generalizable
societal condition denitive of the lived experience of big data into question by
highlighting an apparent disconnect between broad public knowledge of data-driven state
surveillance practices and the absence of generalized worry about how such uses of personal
data may aect individuals once procured by the surveillance. Instead of anxiety around
government geosurveillance practices, individuals are demonstrably largely ambiguous
about them. Identiable data anxieties are however evident at the level of devices,
applications, and services, where individuals express apprehension about the lack of
control they have over their personal spatial data. Accordingly, I suggest that rather than
surveillant anxiety, the lived reality of (spatial) big data is better understood in terms of
control anxietythe impulse of wanting to discern (be informed of, voiced in terms of
concerns with transparency) and direct (maintain the contextual integrity of) ows
of personal locational information about oneself within and across networks, yet feeling
that any attempt to do so is essentially futile.

Anxieties of control
Control anxiety meaningfully captures the device- and application-centric nature of
apprehensions of living in a big data present. I suggest that it arises around locational
information because of the lack of control over the interception, mining, repurposing, and
disclosure of this information that results from the indiscriminate, platform independent,
and pervasive nature of contemporary modes of geosurveillance. This makes dening or
delimiting the context in which personal locational data are captured, passed on to others, or
repurposed beyond the primary hardware/software objects of initial data collection within
networked information ecologies practically unfeasible (Kitchin, 2014a; Marwick and boyd,
2014; Nissenbaum, 2010). This complicates the enactment of strategies or practices for
mitigating where and when locational traces are generated, left, or surreptitiously
intercepted. As Soltani and Gellman (2013b) argue, the ability of the surveillance
978 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(6)

apparatuses to spatially track individuals, their movements and activities on such an

unprecedentedly broad scale, across platforms and contexts, renders eorts at controlling
how and when ones spatial activities get abstracted into big data ows essentially futile
(no page).
The sweeping erosion of privacy being underwritten by big data practices in networked
ecologies eects a sociotechnical milieu in which individuals are responding to a rapidly
changing privacy landscape by attempting to control the ow of data about themselves at a
discernible, identiable source origin of data emanationdevices, applications, and services.
Apps and devices are the locus of the material experience of data, the experiential point at
which data is tied to hardware and software objects with which individuals have contact and
interact. Once data moves beyond devices, services, and applications, it instantly becomes
removed from the sites at which individuals are in immediate, and intimate, contact with
their own data. While data are never immaterial (Kitchin, 2014b), always having a physical
instantiation whether traveling along bee-optic cables or stored in a data center, the
experience of data in a networked ecology is profoundly one of dematerialization. Upon
entry into circuits of content, data are rendered ephemeral, fragmented and dispersed,
divided across dozens of organizations and servers, and. . . subject to integration and
division through analytics (Kitchin, 2014b: 167). Bodies and subject are assembled into
code through big data analytics, but individuals experience disassembly as they are
abstracted into content ows (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000; Hansen, 2012). That concerns
over privacy and attendant anxieties of control are legible at the level of hardware/software
objects is a function of proximity, where proximity designates not only physical distance
(in a data center elsewhere) as well as psychological distance (absence of control).
The hardware/software-centric nature of data anxieties is reinforced by the way in which
devices and applications constitute a locus of privacy harm. This, again, is a function of
proximity. The loss of control experienced the instant data enter the ether of content ows
immediately implicates harms of exclusion (Solove, 2006): the prevention of individuals
from knowing what data is held about them, by whom, and where; omission of individuals
as active participants in the operationalization of their personal data; and, absence of
opportunities for individuals to address and/or rectify errors in their data (Kitchin,
2014b). Asserting control over data owswhich is experienced as a possibility only
before data actually enter into those owsis thereby a means of forestalling privacy
violations of exclusion as well as secondary use (where data are repurposed without the
data subjects knowledge or consent; see Kitchin, 2014b and Solove, 2006). Yet, the privacy
harms associated with the uses of these dataincluding aggregation, identication,
disclosure, and distortion (see Kitchin, 2014b; Solove, 2006)within analytics regimes
underwriting intensifying state-sponsored dataveillance practices operationalized under
Five Eyes SIGAD programs such as CO-TRAVELLER, HAPPYFOOT, and
LEVITATION are demonstrably far more serious as they may be used to not only reveal
things about individuals but also to actively structure their life chances and opportunities.
Why, then, are individuals seemingly more ambivalent about the privacy harms
associated with dataveillance practices? Arguably, this is a function of the aforementioned
distance between individuals and their data introduced by big data as a genre of
technocultural productions, which streamline the process of doing things at a distance,
of separating a person from the consequences of data analytics and the
operationalization of their results (Bauman and Lyon, 2013: 7). This means that
individuals are typically not involved in the life-cycle of their own personal data . . . as it
is collected by websites and mobile apps, which results in a lack of understanding of who
uses their data and for what (Staiano et al., 2014: 1; emphasis added). As a consequence of
Leszczynski 979

the distance between individuals, their data, and the uses of these data, Shklovski et al.
(2014) assert that it is very dicult for individuals to foresee deleterious eects arising
from the capture, interception, disclosure, and repurposing of personal information for
two primary reasons. First, most individuals have never actually experienced the negative
implications of having their spatial behaviors, activities, and patterns analyzed. Even if they
were identied as a person of interest to develop as a target for surveillance based on the
analytics and cross correlation of spatial behaviors, they would likely be unaware of this
reality in the early stages. Second, individuals experience great diculty anticipating any
negative consequences of being abstracted into spatial big data ows because often, there
are too many variables to consider (Shklovski et al., 2014: 2354). As demonstrated in this
paper, this is particularly true of locational tracking and monitoring because the capture,
interception, and registration of locational signals and data occur across contexts, material
spaces, landscapes, platforms, devices, and applications and services.

Conclusion
Rather than a discernible sweeping societal condition of generalized anxiety provoked by the
public disclosures of the scope and nature of dataveillance theorized by Crawford as
surveillance anxiety, in this paper, I have demonstrated that available data evidences
societal apprehensions around big data to be manifesting in terms of anxieties of control
articulated at the level of devices, services, and applications. Surveillance and control are,
however, intimately related. The liquidity of seamless, everywhere, and all-the-time data-
centric surveillance (Bauman and Lyon, 2013), such as that characteristic of the highly
publicized signals intelligence activities of the Five Eyes securities services, implicates
anxieties that are realized as concerns vis-a-vis control that I have framed as control
anxiety. In other words, even though there is apparent ambiguity around state-
sponsored dataveillance practices, device- and application-centric anxieties of control must
be understood as a response to the eects of the intensifying organization of surveillance
around big data productions and analytics, if not to mass surveillance itself. For example,
the lack of transparency that is necessary to maintain state secrecy in requests for personal
data (see Crampton, 2014) does not beget expressions of societal concern with what the
government will do with such data once it is accessed and/or acquiredwhether these will be
fed into locational data-centric analytics suites under eponymous SIGADs such as Tracker
Smurf, for example. Rather, these concerns are expressed in terms of anxieties around
potential privacy harms of exclusion that individuals try to forestall by attempting to
control personal data ows about themselves at sourcei.e., at the level of devices,
applications, and services. Hardware/software is the nadir of correspondenceand
coincidencebetween personal identity (what is disclosed about oneself) and personal
data (abstraction of identity), coalescing. . . information into a single, personal object[s]
(Silverman, 2015: no page).
As per Brown (2013), [t]he most fundamental impact surveillance has on identity is that
it reduces individuals control over the information they disclose about their attitudes in
dierence social contexts (p. 7). Alternatively stated, pervasive, exhaustive, and continuous
dataveillance practices commensurate with networked information ecologies result in what
Marwick and boyd (2011) term context collapse whereby the integrity of personal data
ows can no longer be functionally maintained. Control over personal identity is of critical
importance to not only democracy (Cohen, 2012) but also to quotidian social interaction in
that managing information owi.e., maintaining contextual integrityis fundamental to
regulating and indeed sustaining social relationships (Brown, 2013). Disclosure is a basis of
980 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(6)

trust in intimate relationships (Brown, 2013); conversely, the ability to withhold information
is often important in conict resolution (Brown, 2013). Managing identity through partial
disclosure is furthermore essential to gaining access to life opportunities (e.g., not being
discriminated against in hiring practices).
The amenability of technically mediated social interaction to liquid data interception,
monitoring, and analytics practices such as those bound up with emergent forms of
continuous, pervasive, exhaustive, and extensive state-sponsored geosurveillance present
serious complications for managing identity in networked data ecologies (Brown, 2013).
In the context of spatial big data, anxieties of control are provoked not only by the
inability to maintain the integrity of data ows but indeed also by the diculty of
identifying the very contexts of locational data capture, interception, generation, registry,
and leakage across devices, applications, platforms, landscapes, and environments.
Individuals are reconciling with a quotidian reality in which data have become, as per
Taylor et al. (2014: 1), entirely ordinary presences in the practices and spaces of
everyday life by attempting to controldiscern and directows of spatial big data
about themselves.

Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the thoughtful reections and feedback of members of the Surveillance Studies Centre
at Queens University, to whom I presented a working version of the ideas expressed herein.

Funding
This research was generously supported by a SSHRC Postdoctoral Researcher Award (756-2012-0031).

Notes
1. The intelligence apparatuses of the UK (Government Communications Headquarters; GCHQ),
the United States National Security Agency (NSA), and the intelligence branches of Canada (CSE;
Communications Security Establishment Canada), Australia, and New Zealand.
2. I intend a broad definition of everyday life consistent with what Amin and Thrift (2002) refer to
as that which is familiar[:] the lived experience of spatiality and temporality; the force of
embodiment; the manifestation of subjectivity, affect, and desire; the importance of the event;
[and] the ethico-aesthetic movement of encounter p. 94.
3. After Thatcher (2014).
4. Originally attributable to Clarke (1988), dataveillance is defined as surveillance enacted
through the processing and analyzing of data records (Kitchin, 2014b: 15).
5. Very recently, for example, it was made known that the CIA had invested in research to break and
ultimately infiltrate Apples iOS (mobile-operating system) encryption (Scahill and Begley, 2015).
6. Mobile Themed Briefing, accessed via The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/
interactive/2014/01/28/world/28mobile-annotateB.html
7. Converged Analysis of Smartphone Devices: Identification/Processing/TaskingAll in a days
work, accessed via The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/01/28/world/
28mobile-annotateA.html
8. This designates five billion individual pings off of a cellular network tower, rather than the
exhaustive locational records of five billion persons per day.
9. Levitation and the FFU Hypothesis, CSE document, no date. Accessed via CBC News, http://
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cse-tracks-millions-of-downloads-daily-snowden-documents-1.2930120
10. IP Profiling Analytics & Mission Impacts, CSE document dated 2012. Accessed via CBC News,
http://www.cbc.ca/news2/pdf/airports_redacted.pdf
Leszczynski 981

11. This is a network access point that communicates with a Wi-Fi-enabled device but does not
actually allow access to any usable network (i.e., does not provide Internet connectivity).
12. A notorious example is the Locationgate scandal that unfolded in 2011 when researchers
discovered that Apple devices running versions of iOS 4 were collecting and storing up to a
years worth of time-stamped, highly granular location data in an unencrypted file within iOS
itself, even where users had intentionally disabled Location Services on their devices (Allan and
Warden, 2011).
13. In 2010, it was publicized that Facebook was selling data disclosing the sexual orientation of its
users to advertisers (Cheng, 2010). Individuals sexual orientation was discerned from the kinds of
ads that individuals were clicking on in Facebook (even where the ads were sexualorientation
neutral) rather than on self-reported sexual identity (Cheng, 2010).
14. The US, UK, Germany, Canada, and Japan.
15. Locational privacy refers to the expectations, on the part of individuals, that their locations,
spatial mobility patterns, and behaviors and activities in and across space are not being
surreptitiously recorded, monitored, stored, and repurposed in ways that are compromising of
their safety, security, and confidentiality (Blumberg and Eckersley, 2009).
16. This study received ethics approval from the General Research Ethics Board at Queens
University, where the study was conducted.
17. Respondents were asked about their concerns regarding six data practices: data storage
and security; transparency in data use; legal standards and oversight; collection of location
data; collection of video/audio data; and, collection of telecom (meta)data (The White House,
2014b).

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Agnieszka Leszczynski is a Lectuer in GIScience at the University of Auckland with

particular interests in GIScience & Society, including spatial big data, geoprivacy, and the
ways in which markets are forming around geolocation.