Tracing You is an artwork that presents a website's best attempt to see the world from its visitors’ viewpoints. By cross referencing visitor IP addresses with available online data sources, the work traces each visitor back through the network to its possible origin. The end of that trace is the closest available image that potentially shows the visitor’s physical environment. Sometimes what this image shows is eerily accurate; other times it is wildly dislocated. This computational surveillance system thus makes transparent the potential visibility of one’s present location on the Earth, while also giving each site visitor the ability to watch other visitor “traces” in real time. By making its surveillance capacity and intention overt, Tracing You provokes questions about the architecture of networks and how that architecture affects our own visibility both within and outside of the network. Further, reactions to the work reveal attitudes towards surveillance post-Snowden, including, in some cases, an angry desire for more visibility than Tracing You currently provides. This commentary describes how the artwork functions, presents and discusses visitor reactions, and briefly theorizes origins for these reactions within the contexts of surveillance, sousveillance, and transparency in the age of ubiquitous online social networks.

Introduction While many Big Data sources are reserved for exclusive use by their corporate owners and partners, some are made available for public use. One such source is the data provided by Google’s Maps Service. Vector maps, street photographs, satellite imagery, and location metadata can all be obtained from their Maps API. The author’s online artwork Tracing You (Grosser, 2015) uses this and other data sources to present a website’s best attempt to see the world from its visitors’ viewpoints. This computational surveillance system thus makes transparent the potential visibility of one’s present location on the Earth, while also giving each site visitor the ability to watch other visitor “traces” in real time (Figure 1). By making its surveillance capacity and intention overt, Tracing You provokes questions about the architecture of networks and how that architecture affects our own visibility both within and outside of the network. Further, reactions to the work reveal attitudes towards surveillance post-Snowden, including, in some cases, an angry desire for more visibility than Tracing You currently provides. This commentary describes how the artwork functions, presents and discusses visitor reactions, and briefly theorizes origins for these reactions within the contexts of surveillance, veillance, and transparency in the age of ubiquitous online social networks. Download Open in new tab Download in PowerPoint

Trying to see where you are right now As mentioned above, Tracing You presents a website's best attempt to see the world from its visitors' viewpoints. By cross referencing visitor IP addresses with available online data sources, the system traces each visitor back through the network to its possible origin. The end of that trace is an image that potentially shows the visitor's physical environment. To obtain the image of a visitor's location Tracing You asks for no special permissions; it simply references the same information every user leaves with every website they visit. One piece of that data is the visitor’s Internet Protocol (IP) address. Formatted as a numerical string (e.g. 172.217.5.78), the IP address uniquely identifies the device used to view the site, whether it points to one's phone, laptop, or tablet. Every IP address is registered with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, and thus has data associated with the IP addresses' registration. Tracing You starts with this IP address and follows the trail. First it looks up the IP address using ipinfo1 to obtain geolocation data. This query returns a latitude/longitude pair (e.g. 48.8631831,2.3629368) that identifies a precise location on the earth. The latitude/longitude is sent to Google in order to query their Street View, Static Maps, and Javascript Maps data services. Using these queries, Tracing You searches for the closest available match it can find, whether it is a street image in front of the location, an interior image inside the location, or, if nothing else, a satellite image from above. Once found, this image is combined with text information from ipinfo and shown on the Tracing You interface (Figure 2). The interface shows this image as one “tile” of six—the other tiles representing the five most recent visitors aside from the current user. As new users visit the site, tiles are updated to show the new locations. Others already watching the site see tiles update as new visitors arrive. Download Open in new tab Download in PowerPoint

How visible? The (in)accuracy of tracing location via IP address The accuracy of the location shown in relation to a visitor's current location can vary widely. Sometimes this image is eerily accurate; other times it is wildly dislocated. For example, Tracing You might show a photograph taken inside the building the visitor sits within. Alternatively, the image shown may be a street photograph from down the block, a few blocks over, or, in some cases, much further away. When street view images aren't available, the system resorts to satellite imagery, showing a several block radius around the suspected location. How close the system gets to a visitor's actual location depends on how networks are built, configured, operated, and distributed, which network the visitor's device uses, and the accuracy of the data associated with those networks. Further, the “trace” may be complicated by a visitor's use of network obfuscation techniques such as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or Tor, both of which hide the user's real location by encrypting their data and routing their traffic through proxy networks. Big Data sources such as Google Maps are regularly updated with new information; in this way, Big Data's “picture” of the world is continually refined. As that picture becomes more resolved, Tracing You will become more accurate. As new data sources are made available, the author intends to integrate them into the artwork.

Veillance, transparency, and the desire for visibility These visitor reactions to Tracing You provide clues to understanding user attitudes of surveillance post-Snowden. Those whose location is most accurately detected express concern over how easily their current location can be visualized. One's positionality, based on race or gender for example, likely plays a role here, as the risks of being visible are higher for some. But others, especially those like Beele whose particular network configuration rendered her location less visible, have expressed anger over the perceived invisibility. Why might someone be angry about this, in effect expressing a desire for more accurate surveillance of themselves? One answer lies in “Web 2.0's” (O'Reilly, 2005) insistence on radical transparency.3 Social media in particular has conditioned many to not only accept high visibility, but to desire it (Bucher, 2012: 1175). This is because being as visible as possible on sites like Facebook and Twitter is the key that permits entry into and full participation within those site's systems of interaction and connection. Users can lurk or hide if they choose, but doing so severely limits user experience. When this desire for visibility intersects with ubiquitous transparent veillance, it contributes not only to an acceptance of being seen, but also helps to produce the negative emotions expressed by users less visible to surveillance systems. Being less visible within social networks means having less power; one's power (to influence opinion, to increase friend networks, etc.) is dependent on one's visibility.4 As a result, many visitors to Tracing You have already been conditioned by social networks to equate visibility with power. Thus, by mirroring the veillant structures of sites like Facebook, Tracing You also produces—at least for some of its visitors—a similar desire for visibility. This happens despite the overt potentially negative surveillance implications proposed by Tracing You's ability to reveal one's physical location.

Summary Tracing You investigates issues of veillance, transparency, and Big Data from a practice-based artistic research perspective. By showing website visitors what can be gleaned of their current physical environment based on nothing more than visiting a website, the artwork provokes its visitors to consider how networks are built, configured, operated, and distributed, and how those aspects affect their own visibility to the system. At the same time, the work puts the viewer into a sousveillant position (Mann, 2013: 3), as they are simultaneously viewing not only their own “traces” but also those of others around the world. In an age when various networks we engage with daily make us more or less visible to others, Tracing You models these systems in a way that lets users consider their personal relationship to the network. How susceptible are we to surveillance networks? How much surveillance do we accept, or even desire in this age of radical transparency? By helping visitors answer these questions, Tracing You reveals the emotional landscape that network visibility cultivates. As Big Data improves its understandings of the world, Tracing You will further test how veillance and transparency affects our willingness and desire to be seen by others.

Declaration of conflicting interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes 1

See http://ipinfo.io 2

These user reactions were not solicited as part of a formal study, but were instead observed by the author when posted on public websites by those who read about and/or used Tracing You. Thus, no precise metrics are available regarding response rate or sample size. The reactions sampled here were selected by the author as representative examples of more widely seen attitudes from many sources, including posts on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Hacker News, as well as comments on publications and/or made to the author during exhibitions of the work. 3

By “radical transparency” I refer to both the ideology expressed by Mark Zuckerberg and his inner circle at Facebook towards open sharing (as described in Kirkpatrick, 2010: 207–211), as well as the form described by Andrew McStay (2014: 44–48) that “opens up both public processes and the private lives of citizens.” 4

See Bucher's discussion of “participatory subjectivity” within Facebook.

References