Member-only story
From Surveillance to Dataveillance
Why discussions about surveillance need to change to reflect contemporary circumstances
Take a look at the items that surround you. You may be facing a computer or a phone. Your wallet filled with any number of ID and bank cards might be in your pocket or on the desk beside you. Maybe you’ve requested your Amazon Echo or Google Home to play a relaxing Spotify playlist after coming home from an onerous day of work . When you engage with these technologies, when you put them to use, you are creating something.
Type in ‘Medium’ to the Google search bar and press enter and you have created some of it. Like a photo on social media and you’ve created more. Walk down the street to your local store and swipe your credit card or make your purchase online and more of this invisible commodity is brought into existence. Nearly everything that we as consumer citizens now do in our daily lives can be abstracted, recorded and transformed into a commodity of immense value. Data has become the jet engine fuel for information intensive societies of the 21st century and because of it — we are now all targets of surveillance.
But what does surveillance actually mean? Is this term still best suited for the era of digital transformation we are presently experiencing? How do computers facilitate the…
