Corporate Surveillance Research Articles

Acceptance and self-protection in government, commercial, and interpersonal surveillance contexts: An exploratory study

Digital surveillance is pervasive in cyberspace, with various parties continuously monitoring online activities. The ways in which internet users perceive and respond to such surveillance across overlapping contexts warrants deeper exploration. This study delves into the acceptance of digital surveillance by internet users and their subsequent self-protective actions against it in three distinct contexts: government, commercial, and interpersonal surveillance. Survey responses collected from 356 internet users in the U.S. showed that acceptance levels for surveillance varied between institutional and interpersonal contexts. However, the degree of self-protection remained consistent across all three contexts. Privacy concerns, algorithm awareness, and perceived privacy control played nuanced roles to both surveillance acceptance and self-protection measures in each context. Interestingly, political orientation emerged as a significant moderating factor on surveillance acceptance. Conservative-leaning participants were less accepting of surveillance overall, especially government surveillance. For conservatives, higher privacy concerns meant less acceptance of both government and corporate surveillance. Liberals’ acceptance levels remained fairly consistent and were less affected by privacy concerns. These findings underscore the significance of contextual differences in privacy and surveillance research and provide implications for refining the existing theoretical frameworks.

Price Monitoring, or Where Surveillance Studies Meets the Sociology of Price Formation

This essay stages an encounter between surveillance studies and the sociology of price and price formation. I argue that surveillance is integral to the calculative operations of retail price strategies, especially during periods of high inflation, and that these calculative operations hinge on the human infrastructure of a precarious data-collecting workforce. I present my argument through a case study of competitor price monitoring, a corporate surveillance practice in which commercial actors record, process, and transmit information on competitors’ pricing, inventory, and display strategies. While pricing intelligence services like web-scraping and dynamic pricing algorithms are typically applied in e-commerce settings, I focus here on a firm that specializes in the collection of brick-and-mortar retail price data, with special attention to the labor practices involved in the manual (in-person, device-aided) production of retail price information at the national-industrial scale. Building on auto-ethnographic observations as a price data collector as well as analysis of employee reviews of the firm on sites like Indeed and Glassdoor, I argue that surveillance studies can contribute in significant ways to our understanding of the material practices, and politics, of price and price formation.

Towards a digital zemiology

Surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) represents an unprecedented shift in modes and asymmetries of power. Operating within and through the digital sphere, this new era of capitalism has drastic implications for our understandings of modern surveillance, corporate power, and social control. The digital, in its diffuse simultaneously online and offline form, represents the spatialisation of control within which the user and the data they produce are commodified and their identities consolidated and dissected into knowable, marketable demographics which, once reassembled, no longer represent the human being once behind them (Hammond, 2016; Brusseau, 2020). The digital represents a new frontier of harm production, as user-generated data is exploited to serve corporate interests and the normalisation of digital surveillance has given way to user apathy and technological reliance, undermining user autonomy and opportunities for resistance, while commodifying not only our identities but the entirety of the human experience. Within this context an opportunity emerges to develop a zemiology informed by the digital context that can confront the deepening harms of technologisation and consider the future of resistance. By interrogating the intersection between developments in digital technology and harm production, this article aims to acknowledge the proliferation of normalised corporate surveillance through a development in capitalism (Zuboff, 2015; 2019), and to outline opportunities for theoretical development presented by the digital context, drawing upon works within zemiology (Pemberton, 2016), surveillance studies (Murakami Wood, 2007; Murakami Wood and Ball, 2013), postphenomenology (Ihde, 1990; Verbeek, 2011; Wood, 2021; 2022), and disconnection studies (Kuntsman and Miyake, 2022), to present an invitation to both a unique theoretical orientation and an emerging field of study: digital zemiology.

How pro- and anti-abortion activists use encrypted messaging apps in post-Roe America

In a post- Roe America, abortion-rights activists are scrambling to protect reproductive rights. Communication on open social media platforms like Facebook can now be used to prosecute those seeking an illegal abortion in a frightening entanglement of technology corporations and the state. Building on surveillance studies and feminist scholarship, we analyze 22 interviews with pro- and anti-abortion activists and pro-encryption activists to answer: How will encrypted messaging apps be relevant for pro- and anti-abortion activists post- Roe? We find that while encrypted messaging apps are used by activists on either side of the abortion debate, their motivations for use range from mere convenience to supplanting state and corporate surveillance. We thus argue that encryption can act as a feminist tool to usurp patriarchal surveillance but must be used in combination with a holistic privacy framework. This framework may include care-motivated, community-centered, relational surveillance.

Who is afraid of dataveillance? Attitudes toward online surveillance in a cross-cultural and generational perspective

This article compares surveillance-related experiences and attitudes of two generations of media users in countries with different historical surveillance regimes (Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden) and analyzes the predictors of the attitudes toward contemporary surveillance. A large-scale online survey ( N = 3221) reveals that attitudes toward online state and corporate surveillance are interrelated; the two attitudinal components are, however, generation-specific, having different predictors. Tolerance toward state surveillance is more characteristic of the older group, being predicted by trustful and obedient attitudes toward state authorities and institutions. Tolerance toward corporate dataveillance is more characteristic of the younger group, being predicted by active and self-confident media use. While the socio-historical context molds the intergenerational gaps in surveillance-related experiences and attitudes, individual-level experiences of state surveillance do not predict tolerance toward either type of contemporary surveillance, suggesting that global techno-cultural developments are probably more powerful factors than past experiences in forming generation-specific attitudes.

Surveillance Society: From Communist Czechoslovakia to Contemporary Western Democracies

Abstract Surveillance was long considered one of the main characteristics of communist rule. The ubiquitous presence of the secret police and its informants, citizens who would spy on their own family, friends, and colleagues, was one trait that was considered almost consubstantial to the exercise of communist repression. The regimes paralyzed the people by mobilizing fear: fear of repression, but also fear of the West, and fear of capitalism. But the participation of large chunks of society to this control culture, as well as its high level of conformism, progressively led to the postulate that the communist domination is no more than one particular avatar of modern society. Such an approach revives the notion of individual choice and that of social actors. As dissident thinkers underlined it, it would have been enough for people to question the official dogma, by refusing to live in a lie, for the regimes to collapse. However, surveillance practices have been studied also in Western countries in the past decades. And the recent coronavirus crisis shows yet again that the use of fear in politics is not a prerogative of communist regimes only. We can observe how potent fear is, also in our democracies, as a motivator of individual behavior and extractor of conformism. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has increased the visibility of state and corporate surveillance, yet this new reality has garnered the massive support of the wider public. In fact, it has largely been a demand on the part of a fearful citizenry, who has voluntarily complied to this new surveillance and self-surveillance model. The communist experience should warn us that surveillance leads to censorship and, even more importantly, to a change of behavior. But the current Covid situation should also lead us to reinterpret the degree of sincerity of social actors under communism: we now see that fear can lead to curtailing freedoms with the willing participation of a large part of society.

State Surveillance and Corporate Surveillance

This Research Paper focuses on and deals with the various aspects of Surveillance in India and Internationally. The paper mainly focuses on the State of Surveillance in India and the laws revolving around it as well as the evolution of the Fundamental Right to Privacy in India. The concept of surveillance is divided into two sections of State Surveillance and Corporate Surveillance. It discusses the duty and the Liability of each concerning the Right to Privacy. The Paper also compares India’s Privacy and Surveillance policy with The United States of America and The United Arab Emirates. The United States of America dramatically changed its Surveillance Policy after the terrorist attack of 9/11. The United Arab Emirates envisages a more liberal and comprehensive approach towards Surveillance in their State. It gives the detailed comparison between the laws of these three nations and the vices and virtues of these laws of each nation. The advantages and the disadvantages of surveillance are analysed on various aspects and with an international perspective. This paper attempt to give a comprehensive idea of Surveillance and its impact on the people as well as in the international level due to the fast-pacing globalization.

Hybrid activism under the radar: Surveillance and resistance among marginalized youth activists in the United States and Canada

Social media and digital platforms have become essential tools for the new generation of youth activists. However, these tools subject youth to both new (and old) forms of surveillance and control. Drawing on in-depth interviews and social media walkthroughs with 61 youth activists, I examine hybrid tactics that these youth employ to resist surveillance and other forms of digitally mediated control as they participate in politics and social movements. I show that even in democracies like the United States and Canada, for individuals along intersecting axes of marginalization (e.g. race, gender), public political acts do not capture the full range of young people’s political repertoires. Young people, especially those from marginalized groups, adopt hidden, under-the-radar tactics in response to pressures of social, state, and corporate surveillance. I develop the concept of “digital infrapolitics” referring to the ways in which digital politics and activism go below the radar under surveillance and control.

Why people would (not) change their media use in response to perceived corporate surveillance

Companies collect and process media users’ personal data for automated decision-making or personalized communication. When individuals perceive corporate surveillance, it could contribute to their self-censorship practices, such as using less media or using media differently. This study aims to understand why people decide to self-regulate their media use, which is important from the perspective of control that individuals have over data collection. Therefore, we studied what would motivate individuals to change their media-related behavior in response to perceived corporate surveillance, focusing on cross-country and generational differences. This study employed a combination of a thought-listing exercise conducted in the Netherlands (N = 300) and a cross-sectional survey in the United States (N = 148) and the Netherlands (N = 156) in which respondents were presented with a scenario regarding corporate surveillance and asked about their motivations (not) to change their media use. The studies showed that privacy was a more important motivation for the intent to change media use in the United States, while in the Netherlands people were less motivated to change due to seeing less potential harm of corporate surveillance. The results could be explained by cultural differences or differences in legal protection. Finally, older people saw less threats and were less able to protect themselves, while younger individuals were not motivated to make changes to their media use because of mobile device dependency. This indicates that while more is needed to help people make informed decisions, empowerment measures should be adjusted to different generations and locations.

Smart Parenting? The Internet of Things, Children’s Privacy, and Data Justice

Abstract This paper examines children’s privacy and the Internet of Things (IoT). After describing the operation of IoTs directly marketed to and for children, we outline research concerning the surveillance of children and issues associated with children’s right to privacy, including the role of parents or guardians in protecting their children’s right to privacy. We then present the findings of a survey of Australian IoT consumers and non-consumers (n = 1,052), which shows parents and guardians who purchase IoTs care about their children’s privacy and are concerned about practices of corporate surveillance. Finally, our data show that female parents or guardians have lower rates of privacy literacy than males. Analysed through the lens of data justice (Dencik et al., 2016), we argue the protection of children’s privacy rights must be understood with regard to broader structural factors, such as gender discrimination and digital housekeeping, and ultimately requires addressing corporate practices that characterise the contemporary surveillance landscape.

Surveillance Capitalism or Information Republic?

ABSTRACTRecent years have seen growing concerns about corporate surveillance. Critics of surveillance capitalism often use the language of domination and unfreedom to describe these new socio‐technological conditions. Yet there has been little sustained normative analysis that has diagnosed the new forms of domination introduced by surveillance capitalism or considered the remedies needed to remove them. That is what this article provides. We draw on the latest republican literature to argue that surveillance capitalism introduces new forms of domination that compel ordinary citizens to subject themselves to surveillance and allow corporations uncontrolled power to determine the terms of surveillance, while also subjecting corporations to new incentives of extraction. Traditional republican remedies for domination were not designed to address these new challenges. We therefore outline a vision of an Information Republic that can do so.

Red, yellow, green or golden: the post-pandemic future of China's health code apps

ABSTRACT The red, yellow, and green three-colored health code apps (HCAs) have been credited as an effective tool for the COVID-19 response in China, with a golden color added indicating vaccination status in spring 2021. Although the success of HCA as a public health intervention might have legitimized government or corporate surveillance, the scope and contour of post-pandemic HCA use remain unclear. Both officials and tech firms have been promoting broader post-pandemic HCA use for purposes beyond pandemic control. This research draws on theories on privacy, trust, and media engagement to investigate factors affecting Chinese public opinion on HCA's post-pandemic use. Original survey data were collected in 2021 from adult HCA users in two major Chinese cities: Wuhan where COVID-19 cases were first identified and Hangzhou where the first HCA was deployed. Results point to a majority for moderate post-pandemic HCA use, while almost four out of ten users support expansive HCA use and the voice for restricted or terminated use is tiny. Greater acceptance of HCA data use by various institutional stakeholders, greater institutional trust, greater engagement with COVID-19 related social media content increased the support for expansive use.

COVID-19, International Human Rights Law and the State-Corporate Complex

Abstract Data-driven technologies (such as mobile phone-based tracing apps) have been at the forefront of public health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, we have also seen high-level expressions of concern about how state actions ostensibly in pursuit of public health goals have in fact greatly accelerated existing human rights concerns about newer technologies, especially increased state and corporate surveillance. This article explores issues at the nexus of COVID-19 public health responses, civil-political rights under international human rights law, and the responsible governance of data-driven technologies. In particular, it offers a framework to evaluate the human rights compatibility of tech-assisted COVID-related state measures. The articles also explore analogies between COVID-related measures and post-2001 counter-terrorism actions taken by states in the name of public security. It cautions against exceptional measures becoming hardwired in ways that may unreasonably impact on pre-COVID freedoms. The article argues that the blurring of state and corporate surveillance and data-gathering and the often symbiotic relationship between tech firms and governments (the ‘state-corporate complex’) complicate efforts to assert clear frames of responsibility.

Fossil fuel violence and visual practices on Indigenous land: Watching, witnessing and resisting settler-colonial injustices

While controversial plans for fossil fuel pipeline-building continue across Indigenous lands without consent, how are visual practices – including watching and witnessing – serving as modes of resistance? Drawing on a participant-observation ethnography over the 2018–2021 period with environmental defenders on Coast Salish land, in what is colonially called ‘British Columbia, Canada’, this article offers a lens for exploring visual realms of resistance amid expanding extractivism, police surveillance and reconfigured pipeline opposition during the COVID-19 pandemic. Grassroots photography in land-based monitoring, artistic communication in and around courtrooms and other visual practices have been serving as powerful inflection points, countering multiple facets of petro-colonialism – ecological destruction, health threats, and moral and legal transgressions by companies and state institutions. They have also been stimulating new collective actions, some led by Indigenous land protectors extending longstanding traditions of protecting human and non-human life. As ‘more-than-representational’, visual encounters can be active players in constructing knowledge, challenging structures of dispossession, genocide and ecocide, and cultivating understandings of care, sovereignty, climate justice and anti-colonial solidarity from heterogeneous vantage points. Some environmental defenders’ visual creativities invite deep reflection on ontologies rooted in reciprocity and respect that are thoroughly ignored in extractivist settler-colonial cultures. The article situates visual strategies in fraught political contexts of ramped-up police and corporate surveillance targeting Indigenous land protectors and other environmental defenders, underscoring critical concern about superficial optical allyship and hollow gestures by state actors responding to racism and state violence on Indigenous land. It calls for attention to dialectical relationships amongst state visual tactics and counter-hegemonic visual practices in struggles to resist colonial energy regimes and to cultivate efforts towards alternative, less destructive energy futures.

Green Eyes: Corporate Surveillance of Environmental Activists

This analysis examines contemporary examples of corporate surveillance and offers new questions to guide future research on the role of privacy, social media, and grey intelligence on surveillance of environmental activist groups. In particular, this study explores different cases of activist monitoring, both online and in person, to demonstrate that the increase of activism on social media, while seemingly beneficial, has also made activists more vulnerable to surveillance by corporations because of the public nature of their personal information. The paper also proposes that grey intelligence, which is the phenomena of corporations colluding with former and current government actors to carry out their activist surveillance, is a rising phenomenon that should be the subject of future research. To provide background of these topics, this analysis investigates the various conceptions of privacy and surveillance and discusses how they have been defined previously in both philosophical and legal terms. This section covers how the definition of privacy and the requisites of the US legal system may pose a barrier to activists seeking recourse in the court system for corporate monitoring. This investigation also discusses the drivers of corporate surveillance and connects this phenomenon to reputational capital and corporate strategy literature.

The not-so-great transformation

Abstract Many have attributed the excesses of private power in the digital age to the internet’s “lawlessness.” Julie Cohen’s Between Truth and Power explains why this is a dangerous misconception. The law has not sat idle during the rise of informational capitalism; it has undergone extensive transformation and now facilitates corporate surveillance and manipulation on a global scale. Meanwhile, legal institutions have taken a turn towards managerialism and away from democratic accountability. Recognizing these transformations and the ideologies that motivate them is critical to grappling with the legal challenges of the digital era.

Comparative analysis of China’s Health Code, Australia’s COVIDSafe and New Zealand’s COVID Tracer Surveillance Apps: a new corona of public health governmentality?

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown of cities worldwide generated a dramatic increase in the use of public health trac(k)ing technologies. This article presents an empirical analysis of China’s Health Code on WeChat and Alipay, Australia’s COVIDSafe and New Zealand’s COVID Tracer. We ask: how does app-based public health monitoring differ from prior forms of state tracking and corporate surveillance, and interface with public and private ideals of health and citizenship? Based on a comparative analysis of the selected apps and the political economy that surrounds their code and implementation, we argue that there is a new corona of surveillance to address COVID-19 crises by intensifying the diffusion of national surveillance technologies and framing these into justifiable moral practice. In conclusion, we identify a new ‘corona’ of public health governmentality during COVID-19 pandemic through an intensification of top-down institutional data extraction from human bodies.

Privacy in Pandemic: Law, Technology, and Public Health in the COVID-19 Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused millions of deaths and disastrous consequences around the world, with lasting repercussions for every field of law, including privacy and technology. The unique characteristics of this pandemic have precipitated an increase in use of new technologies, including remote communications platforms, healthcare robots, and medical AI. Public and private actors are using new technologies, like heat sensing, and technologically-influenced programs, like contact tracing, alike in response, leading to a rise in government and corporate surveillance in sectors like healthcare, employment, education, and commerce. Advocates have raised the alarm for privacy and civil liberties violations, but the emergency nature of the pandemic has drowned out many concerns. This Article is the first comprehensive account of privacy impacts related to technology and public health responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Many have written on the general need for better health privacy protections, education privacy protections, consumer privacy protections, and protections against government and corporate surveillance. However, this Article is the first comprehensive article to examine these problems of privacy and technology specifically in light of the pandemic, arguing that the lens of the pandemic exposes the need for both widescale and small-scale reform of privacy law. This Article approaches these problems with a focus on technical realities and social salience, and with a critical awareness of digital and political inequities, crafting normative recommendations with these concepts in mind.Understanding privacy in this time of pandemic is critical for law and policymaking in the near future and for the long-term goals of creating a future society that protects both civil liberties and public health. It is also important to create a contemporary scholarly understanding of privacy in pandemic at this moment in time, as a matter of historical record. By examining privacy in pandemic, in the midst of pandemic, this Article seeks to create a holistic scholarly foundation for future work on privacy, technology, public health, and legal responses to global crises.

Contingent Claims

Technocapitalism acts through micro-performative mechanisms which escape human cognition and sense perception but at the same time influence individual behaviour and social conduct. Automated finance and corporate surveillance are both leveraged by proprietary tools operating in the invisible realm of microseconds. While its immediate agency colonizes the future at present, it escapes our phenomenological scope. In fact, technocapitalism operates on a new level of exercising power by shifting its language from representative to performative speech. Hence, data-driven performativity has very material consequences on our real biological and social lives – we are losing our senses in more than one way. How can we move and see through the maze of finance and other data-driven performativity? This essay argues that the performative arts are well situated to create participative situations and alliances that allow for embodied awareness to reveal and resist these infrastructures. However, such art needs to translate technocapitalism beyond cognition, speech and rationality. And such counter-performative aesthetics are to be situated in the field of consequences and take performance outside the metaphoric spaces of the (live) arts. The essay therefore proposes a new reading of the term ‘resolution’ and its semantic field – ranging from perception and visualization to knowledge production and (joint) decision making – to counter the non-transparency of black box exploitation. But there is an urgency to go a step further and transgress the realm of critique and representation towards performative engagements in insurrection if we want to claim an agency in which all the senses of resolution come to bear. Activating the potential of resolution as an alternative to the rather passive notion of transparency calls for ‘renegade activism’ as a strategy of resistance that makes the black box speak from inside.

Charts, Indexes, and Files: Surveillance, Information Management, and the Visualization of Subversion in Mainline Protestantism

ABSTRACTThis essay explores how some Americans came to view the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and, more broadly, ecumenical mainline Protestantism as a threat to the national security interests of the United States. By focusing on the efforts of various elements in the federal bureaucracy—including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Chemical Warfare Service, and Military Intelligence—and the work of average Americans to investigate the FCC, the essay examines how techniques of surveillance and information management helped shape the way Americans came to understand religion in the twentieth century. The essay develops three interconnected themes: first, the rise of America's national security surveillance establishment in the United States after World War I; second, the development of new methods of information management and visualization in corporate and state bureaucracies; and, third, the rise of voluntary, private surveillance in the wake of World War I. Through these three themes, the essay highlights how a network of federal bureaucrats, business leaders, and average citizens used graphs, indexes, and files to interpret mainline, ecumenical Christianity as a threat to domestic security in the United States. Ultimately, the project suggests that scholarly efforts to assess fissures in U.S. Protestantism have focused too much on controversies over belief and theology—especially those related to evolutionary theory, eschatology, and scriptural inerrancy—and paid far too little attention to the emerging bureaucratic systems of state and corporate surveillance that helped to document, visualize, and disseminate these accusations in the first place.