CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A web-based art project can show the current physical location of visitors to the online site, sometimes with uncanny accuracy. Creepy or cool?
“Tracing You,” designed by University of Illinois artist and researcher Ben Grosser, uses a visitor’s Internet Protocol address and cross references it with online data sources such as Google Maps to show the visitor’s physical environment. Grosser wrote an article, published recently in the journal Big Data & Society, about the project and reactions to it.
A professor of new media in the School of Art and Design, Grosser works on an initiative in critical technology studies at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He focuses on the cultural, social and political effects of software.
Grosser described “Tracing You” as “an artwork that presents a website’s best attempt to see the world from its visitors’ viewpoints.” The viewpoint might be a street view or even an interior image of the location of a website visitor, or it might be an image from a location blocks away or a satellite image of the approximate location of the visitor, based on the geolocation data available for the IP address of the device the visitor used to look at the website.
“Sometimes this image is eerily accurate; other times it is wildly dislocated,” Grosser wrote in the journal article.
The image is shown on the “Tracing You” website, along with the IP address and physical location. Visitors to the website can watch as the images of the locations of other recent visitors are posted.
By making the surveillance overt, Grosser intends to provoke questions about the architecture of networks and how it affects our visibility, as well as the attitudes about surveillance post-Edward Snowden. He wants visitors to ask how susceptible they are to surveillance, and how much surveillance they accept or even desire.
Reactions to the project have varied. Some people expressed unease and fear at the accuracy with which the website can show their location. Others appreciated how accurate “Tracing You” could be in its ability to find their location.
The most unexpected reaction for Grosser, though, was anger – not anger at his project’s surveillance of visitors to the website, but anger at results that weren’t as accurate as users expected. One Facebook user called the project a “big fat fail” because it did not locate her as accurately as she expected.
Grosser wrote that people like that user, “whose particular network configuration rendered her location less visible, have expressed anger over the perceived invisibility.” He argues that reaction is the result of people being conditioned by social networks to equate visibility with power.
“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,” he wrote. “‘Tracing You’ reveals the emotional landscape that network visibility cultivates.”
Editor’s notes: To reach Ben Grosser, email grosser@illinois.edu.
The journal article “Tracing You: How transparent surveillance reveals a desire for visibility” can be found online.
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