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Persuasive Essay On Self Surveillance

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On a positive note, self-surveillance devices can also protect the innocent from unjust procedures by providing them with an alibi (Dennis, 2008, p. 353). In other words, these gadgets have the potential to safeguard us from jail time. For example, a man named Hasan Elahi was frustrated with always being detained for his appearance and mobility after the 9/11 attacks, so he decided to deal with this by using his smartphone’s map to indicate to officers the exact spot he was at during the time an event took place with even taking pictures to provide evidence that he was not involved in any crime that he was suspected to be in (Dennis, 2008, p. 352). For this reason, Elahi’s self-surveillance is both a measure of safety and a hassle for him as he is forced to document his life, so that he is not questioned for every move he makes because of his looks and lifestyle (Dennis, 2008, p. 352). Even though self-surveillance technologies can create an alibi it unfortunately becomes a matter of privilege as those who are considered the “norm” are not scrutinized as much as those who stand out (Kang et al., 2011, p. 34). With that being said, self-surveillance starts to affect powerless individuals even though this is not how the gadgets were designed to be used (Dennis, 2008, p. 352). Instead the purpose of using these devices was for us to use them to take initiative in our protection without expecting others to do it for us (Dennis, 2008, p. 352). Disappointingly, it seems that our intentions become lost in the process as self-surveilling tools become an instrument in which we can prejudge those who we believe seem likely to have committed a crime or will likely commit one in the future (Dennis, 2008, p. 352). On account of this unsettling findings it is crucial that we do not always trust technology to answer all of our problems rather it should be used as an additional source of knowledge (Goodyear et al., 2017, p. 2). Overall, as long as self-surveillance devices are used by mature human beings we can see that technology can prevent and protect us from any form of threat that might come our way (Dennis, 2008, p. 350).
The way we appear on social media is not usually the way we look or behave in real life. The

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