Adversarial interiors : a home security system in the age of surveillance capitalism

Abstract

Over 300 hours of video content is uploaded to the internet every minute. Whether the filming of daily life is considered intrusive or not, the current generation has become a society of self-surveillance. In a time marked by emerging debates of digital ownership and privacy, these concerns are encroaching into the territory of domestic space. Millions of recordings featuring private interiors can be modeled, mapped and archived in a spirit that echoes Google Earth. Just as tools for online risk management have become necessary, e.g. email encryption and anonymous browsing, the need for techniques of concealing space are arising as well. This thesis investigates methods of obscuring spatial legibility for individual security. Personal preferences, tendencies, and subjective desires are being quantified, mined and sold across the online market. In light of the recent launches of recording devices such as Google Home Hub, Amazon Echo Show, and Facebook Portal, this thesis questions the future implications of the profiling and monetization of spatial information. Beyond the invasion of privacy, the threat of data mining also includes: the misreading of the domestic landscape, the objective perception of the interior world, and the ownership of content generated from raw data. Without adequate knowledge of these future consequences, individuals are willingly capturing video footage, generating spatial data, and feeding information into systems of surveillance capitalism. In response to the age of the smart-phone and culture of recording everything, this thesis offers methods for introducing artifacts, blindness and disguise (the addition, omission and obscuring of information by design or defect) in order to provide tools for a new era of domestic privacy.