Privacy Without Power: What Privacy Research Can Learn from Surveillance Studies

Abstract

While privacy and surveillance are inextricably intertwined, they often co-exist uneasily in scholarship. This essay argues that while surveillance studies centers questions of marginalization and collective responsibilization, the same is true only for a subset of privacy scholarship. By conducting a close reading of the proceedings of three different privacy conferences, I show how issues of power are de-emphasized or made invisible in much research on privacy. I then consider the popular social video sharing app TikTok to illustrate how concepts taken from surveillance studies might better illuminate its privacy issues.