4. Surveillance and Privacy

Where we fine purposeful, routine, systematic and focused attention paid to personal details, for the sake of control, entitlement, management, influence or protection, we are looking at surveillance

• Surveillance Studies Network (2006), p.4.

Surveillance:
- Involves purposeful and systematic attention to personal data,
- Typically involves an attempt to control or manage behaviour,
- Is often used by elements of society with power.

The Panopticon model

Derived from the Greek

• Pan: Everything
• Opticon: Observe
  The Panopticon model is a circular structure, with an “inspection house” at the centre, from which a single watchman can observe the hundreds of “cells” around the perimeter of the room.
  Though the watchman cannot actually watch everyone at once, the inmates cannot be sure where the watchman is watching and therefore have the sense of always being watched.

Dystopias

Though the “panopticon” was a design for a building the theory can be applied to societies
For instance, Nazi Germany, Fascist Spain and Soviet Russia used techniques to make people feel constantly observed, to control the populace
These techniques include:

• Interior spy networks
• Interception of telegraphs and telephone calls
• Secret police
  Surveillance as observation enables people in power to respond to and clamp down on activities that they oppose
  Surveillance as control is designed to prevent people from acting in a certain way that authorities oppose, because they fear they are being watched in the first place
  • When people believe they are being observed they will act more ‘lawfully’

Privacy

Why do we think privacy is valuable?

• Privacy may be necessary for individuality, the capacity to think, speak, and act as we like
• Privacy allows us to experiment with new ideas or actions without fear of them being publicly known
• Privacy allows people to have freedom or autonomy over their own lives, without being subject to control
• Privacy allows people to have space to reflect
• Privacy gives people control over how they are perceived and what information about them other people know
• Intimacy with others means that we choose who we allow into out private lives. Without privacy, perhaps there is no intimacy

Trust

• Watching someone (with or without consent) often implies that we do not trust them to act in the right way
• When we show this lack of trust in people, a number of bad things can follow:
  • The people being watched can start to feel belittled and undermined. The act of watching over people in in effect a judgement of them as untrustworthy
  • Often, if we are not being trusted, we lose trust in others, especially in the people doing the watching. This can lead to resentment in those being observed
  • Mistrust is indicative of a break down in a relationship
• This may well be true on a social/political level as well as on a personal one

Autonomy

By Autonomy we tend to mean
- “Freedom (from external control)” or
- “Capacity ”to govern our own actions
Surveillance might damage people’s “autonomy” in both senses of the word

• Surveillance is external control
• If we know we are being watched, we tend to alter our behaviours, reducing our capacity to govern our own actions
  Though this might prevent people from committing illegal actions (which itself may not be morally problematic), it may dissuade people from participating in legal and legitimate actions
• e.g. police surveillance at (legitimate) public protests can prevent people afraid of monitoring from expressing their voice
  This also operates in states in which public dissent is technically legal, but it is widely known you will be punished for participating
• Applies to business, etc.

Justifications

We’ve seen that surveillance is often unethical for reasons of privacy, trust and autonomy
However, these reasons against surveillance can be outweighed by the benefits of surveillance

Security

A reasons frequently offered for surveillance is security
Security surveillance comes in two forms:

• Surveillance for deterrence is generally visible e.g. CCTV surveillance in public areas
  • This aims to prevent certain illegal or antisocial behaviour
• Surveillance for the sake of detection is generally invisible, e.g. tapping private phone lines
  • This aims to discover illegal behaviour
    Some surveillance does both, e.g. traffic cameras

Information

We might collect data because we need information
This might be for:

• Security purposes (e.g. face scanning)
• Research purposes (e.g. medical information gathering)
• Planning purposes (e.g. traffic information online)
• Commercial purposes (e.g. data on online shopping habits)

Health and Safety

We might surveil people we take to be particularly at risk or vulnerable, for their own good:

• Parents monitoring children
• Monitoring the elderly in care homes
  We might also surveil a wider population:
• Monitoring the prevention and spread of diseases (e.g. quarantine, vaccination)
• Monitoring people using government assistance,
  • Either to make sure they have the correct support, or to make sure that they are not receiving money they are not entitled to

Efficiency

Automated surveillance, such as CCTV, can be far more efficient and cost effective than using real people
- e.g. it is cheaper to employ one person to monitor twenty screens than it is to employ twenty people. It is even cheaper if the CCTV is fully automated, and doesn’t need monitoring at all

Notes

These causes do not make surveillance legitimate by themselves

• Surveillance for the sake of deterrence can also deter legitimate actions
• We can gather information for nefarious reasons as well as positive ones
• Monitoring people “for their own good” can be highly paternalistic and can damage people’s autonomy
• Automated surveillance can lead to innocent people being falsely flagged

Is Surveillance Justified?

If the surveillance is carried out by someone who has the right kind of authority, then it is more legitimate
For instance, we require that the police gain a warrant from a judge (a person of moral and legal authority) before being allowed to surveil a suspect
To be legitimate, authorities must:

• Not act for their own sake, but for the sake of the public good
• Have power conferred on them by an appropriate source (in a democracy, this is often considered to be the public)
• Be held accountable (so can be removed if they do not fulfil their responsibilities)

Something is necessary in this sense if it is the only way of achieving the desired end
The methods that we use should be appropriate and reasonable given the value of achieving our goals
We should not use draconian or harmful methods unless our ends are sufficiently important

• So, the police tapping public phones to catch a serial killer might be appropriate
• But, tapping public phones to catch a shop-lifter might not be

Legitimate surveillance should discriminate between those who should be monitored and those that should not
Considering the harms that might come from surveillance, we should limit the people who are “incidentally” monitored
What makes people liable?

• Good evidence of possible wrong-doing
• Connection to people who are doing wrong (monitoring a mob boss’ barber to catch the mob boss, for instance)