What is the cost of cashing in on global surveillance?

Surveillance has become an unavoidable presence in our everyday lives - it's embedded in our culture. As corporations profit from its rapid growth, inevitable questions about the impact on our society and ethics must be addressed.

Surveillance sweeps over many aspects of our everyday lives in the 21st century – routine interactions with governments, corporations and many other organisations. In an increasingly data dependent world we can't escape surveillance. It is a fundamental element of our experiences, interaction and initiative in countries spanning the global north and south, not least through internet and social media use. Surveillance has rapidly become part of an entire way of life that involuntarily places all of us under close scrutiny, even through mundane practices such as complacent data donation or social ranking.

But these are not innocent cultural developments; they echo and embody an emerging stage of political-economic development, ‘surveillance capitalism.’ Led by giant internet corporations such as Google, this phenomenon promotes data capture and analysis as the new fuel for prosperity and progress. If this conjunction is correctly stated, it raises profound questions about social relationships, for ethics, the politics of data and the life that we take for granted.