In services that look free, payment is made in attention and data rather than money. The problem is not only that somebody watches us; it is that the gaze makes itself invisible while it arranges our lives.
Surveillance is no longer only a matter of the state’s secret services or cameras on walls. From the moment we switch off the phone alarm in the morning we leave a data trail running through the day, from our cards to our applications. We look for a route on a map, pass through a turnstile, shop, message and watch videos. Each of these acts looks small and ordinary; but combined they form a detailed portrait showing where we are, what we want and which behaviour we are inclined to.
What is given in exchange for convenience
Digital services genuinely make life easier. We find our way without getting lost, talk with people far away and reach the information we need in seconds. The problem is not convenience itself but the vagueness of its price. In most services that look free, payment is made in attention and data rather than money. The user usually does not know which information is collected, how it is combined with other data and how long it is kept.
Consent texts do not turn this relation into an equal agreement. If we cannot reach the service when we refuse pages of conditions written in legal language, we are not conducting a real negotiation. Moreover, even if it is possible to stay away from a single application, withdrawing from digital life altogether can mean exclusion from work, education and social relations.
The measured life at work
One of the fields where surveillance has expanded fastest is working life. Clock-in records, screenshots, keyboard movements, location data and customer ratings can all be used to measure an employee’s performance. A courier’s route, a call-centre worker’s talk time and the minutes a remote worker stays online are tracked in detail.
While these systems claim to deliver efficiency, they reduce a person’s working conditions to numbers. Traffic, caring responsibilities, a customer’s attitude and the invisible difficulty of the work may fall outside the score. The person being measured turns towards producing the signals the system counts as good rather than doing the work well. Surveillance does not merely record behaviour; it determines which behaviour can survive.
Getting used to watching one another
Not all modern surveillance comes from above. On social media people scan one another’s past posts, spread images without permission and submit behaviour to the judgement of a crowd. A parent can follow a child, spouses each other, employees their colleagues through location data. A practice that began for the sake of safety or closeness can turn into an expectation of constant accounting.
The question “why are you uncomfortable if you have nothing to hide?” links privacy to crime. Yet a person has the right to be alone and to live different sides of themselves in different relations. Constant visibility does not necessarily produce honesty; it can force people to display acceptable behaviour. Privacy is not where wickedness hides but the space in which a self can experiment and change.
The silent steering of the algorithm
The data collected are not used only to record the past; they are processed to predict what we will do in future and to steer our behaviour. Which content we will see, which product will appear before us and which notification will be sent when are determined according to our personal profile. The decision still looks like ours, but the environment of choice has been arranged according to other people’s aims.
This steering does not have to be absolute. A company being able to change the behaviour of a few per cent of people can create great economic and political value. The aim is not to seize everyone’s will but to push enough people often enough in the desired direction. Surveillance therefore becomes, beyond the collection of information, a technology for managing behaviour.
How far can the security pretext stretch?
Cameras, facial recognition systems and big-data analyses are spread on the grounds of fighting crime or public safety. Using technology in the face of real dangers is understandable. But an infrastructure built for an exceptional purpose can later be used to track the movements of ordinary citizens. Once data begin to be collected, opening them to new purposes is extremely easy.
We cannot measure the effect of surveillance only by how many crimes were prevented. We must also see the cost paid by people wrongly identified, mistakenly treated as suspects, or watched more closely merely because they belong to a particular social group. Just as security is not distributed equally, neither is the burden of surveillance.
Privacy is not an individual setting
Changing phone settings, turning off notifications and choosing more careful applications can be useful. But the problem of surveillance cannot be solved by individual precautions alone. While people are expected to read and understand everything continually, companies use expert teams and large budgets to collect data. Leaving this unequal relation to personal vigilance loads responsibility in the wrong place.
Data collection must be limited, tied to explicit purposes and independently audited. People must be able to object to automated decisions, to see the information held about them, and must not be forced into unnecessary loss of privacy in order to use a system. Because modern surveillance is embedded in everyday life, freedom against it must also be built as an everyday right. The problem is not only that somebody watches us, but that the gaze makes itself invisible while it arranges our lives.
The most ordinary support of modern surveillance is the promise of convenience. We give our face so as not to remember a password, our location to pass through faster, our habits for a personalised service. Taken one by one these exchanges can look reasonable. But when data are combined for different purposes, the original consent loses its meaning. A phone number given for a purchase can turn into an advertising profile, a record in a health app into an insurance assessment, an access log at work into a performance score. A consent box cannot enable us to foresee all future uses.
Surveillance is also unequally distributed. While powerful institutions measure people in detail, they keep their own decision processes closed on grounds of commercial secrecy, security or managerial authority. An employee’s minutes are recorded but how pay policy is set is not explained. A citizen’s movement is tracked but the error rate of the security technology is unknown. A user’s behaviour is analysed but which interest the ranking system serves stays invisible. Transparency becomes a virtue expected of those below and avoided by those above.
Everyday surveillance also makes people one another’s supervisors. Sharing footage of neighbours in building groups, scoring a courier’s every movement, exposing a teacher or a doctor through a short clip can look like holding someone to account. Sometimes it makes a real injustice visible; sometimes it destroys context and turns into the crowd’s instant punishment. If the power to record is democratised while the possibilities of forgetting, explaining and correcting do not grow at the same speed, everyone becomes both watched and watcher.
The solution is therefore not merely switching off a few permissions in the settings. Services that collect no data must be possible, necessary data must be limited by purpose, retention periods kept short, and real routes of objection opened against automated decisions. Privacy is a shared right that cannot be left to an individual’s technical skill. Unless an order is built in which people are not obliged to make themselves wholly readable in order to take part in digital life, convenience will remain a silent contract of obedience.