Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology ... - The ICHRP

III. Security and Surveillance
Having laid some parameters regarding the notions of privacy and technology, the
Discussion Paper now turns to the paradigmatic domain in which privacy is perceived as
threatened by data-collecting technologies: surveillance. Typically, surveillance and privacy
are presented as opposed, but it is also the case that each presupposes the other. Might
privacy require surveillance and vice versa? What if the right to privacy depends upon the
existence of surveillance and an acknowledgement that some of it, at least, is legitimate?
The question then would be: how much and what kinds of surveillance are illegitimate?
Privacy has become our default path into this set of questions, but it is not the only one.
The present section will set aside the “right to privacy” for the moment; we will pick it up
again in Chapter 5. Here, after looking at the issue of privacy and surveillance, we will
examine the rise in public and private surveillance, drawing on Michel Foucault’s 1978
lectures on “security, territory, population”. We will then turn to one aspect of identity
formation in the context of contemporary surveillance to illustrate the shaping pressure
that insistent tracking may be expected to exert on the “private” person.
Typically, surveillance and privacy are presented as opposed – but it is also
the case that each presupposes the other. Might privacy require surveillance
and vice versa?
Privacy and Surveillance
Privacy, or certain contemporary conceptions of it, has a symbiotic relationship with
surveillance. The best known account of the “history of private life”, the five volumes
edited by Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, tracks privacy in relation to expanding
personal spaces: the surveillance of family and neighbourhood recedes and, with it,
pressure for social conformity. 67 Living and working spaces were reorganized with
industrialization: fewer people shared bedding and housing space, working and living
spaces became segregated and individuals carved out private spaces for themselves.
Freed from the watchful eyes of parents, relatives and neighbours, the free labourer
lived increasingly among, though apart from, peers with mixed and diverging standards.
Privacy emerges, on this account, as a consequence or effect of reduced surveillance.
Living and working spaces were reorganized with industrialization: fewer
people shared bedding and housing space, working and living spaces
became segregated and individuals carved out private spaces for themselves.
As traditional norm-enforcement receded, a problem of trust arose. Stephen Nock
captures this well in The Costs of Privacy:
[H]istorically, increasing numbers of strangers produced greater and more
pervasive personal privacy. Modern Americans enjoy vastly more privacy
than did their forebears because ever and ever larger number of strangers
in our lives are legitimately denied access to our personal affairs. Changes
in familial living arrangements are largely responsible for these trends.
Privacy, however, makes it more difficult to form reliable opinions of one
67 Ariès and Duby (1991), 9–49.
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