The end of ̶h̶i̶s̶t̶o̶r̶y̶ surveillance?

Don’t call me video surveillance anymore (but video protection). The introduction in 2011, in the French Internal Security Act b (Loi d’orientation et de programmation pour la performance de la sécurité intérieure), of this new term to designate the installation of cameras in public spaces for security purposes reflected both a political objective and a certain discomfort with a term that never leaves anyone indifferent.

As Olivier Aïm notes in the introduction to his book Les théories de la surveillance, surveillance is an “overflowing” and “all-encompassing” subject insofar as it now covers “any issue involving data, privacy, and information and communication technologies,” and even the “new forms of the exercise of power or the valorisation of commodities”. Following in particular the work of Michel Foucault (Surveiller et punir, 1975), an entire field of research has developed, leading to the emergence in North America of Surveillance Studies in the early 2000s. The aim is to study surveillance as a “total social fact” (Aïm, 2020), encompassing multidimensional realities (economic, historical, sociological, technological, etc.) that influence individuals. Surveillance Studies approaches this field in all its dimensions, structured around a network, the Surveillance Studies Network, a journal, Surveillance & Society, and a biennial conference.

Since the 1970s, the development and widespread adoption of digital technologies, devices and services, have transformed the forms surveillance takes. Initially unilateral and state-driven, surveillance has expanded into multidirectional uses, carried out by all kinds of actors. Surveillance by public authorities still sparks considerable debate in France, as recently as 2024 during the organisation of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, which served as a testing ground for “algorithmic video surveillance”. By contrast, the practices of private actors tend to provoke more muted reactions. On this point, Shoshana Zuboff popularized in 2019 a new expression in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, referring to a system driven by large platforms whose revenue models rely on extracting data for the purpose of profiling users in order to predict and influence human behavior. In simplified terms, most people trade their collective freedoms and their privacy for a lifestyle of convenience and leisure that provides them with immediate satisfaction as consumers.

But beyond a simple division between state surveillance on the one hand and surveillance by “big tech” on the other, multiple and varied forms coexist, like so many intersecting and overlapping gazes, enabled by digital tools and services that have become accessible to the greatest number. People “passively and often voluntarily collaborate [...] in [their] own surveillance and in the analysis of their data” (Crary, 2013).

In 2022, the LINC published an article, All watched, all watching?, on “peer-to-peer surveillance,” describing new practices in which “everyone can now have access to technological means to monitor or track those close to them, in a new ‘Big Other’ society”.

It is a true patchwork of concepts developed within the field of Surveillance Studies to describe each of its forms, according to their perspectives, objectives, and actors, of which the following are a few examples related to peer surveillance:

• Lateral surveillance (Andrejevic, 2006): an asymmetrical, non-transparent, and non-reciprocal form of citizens monitoring one another. This includes practices such as the use of connected doorbells (like Amazon Ring), or wearable cameras (on GoPros or embedded in glasses).
• Social surveillance (Marwick): a reciprocal form of monitoring between citizens, unlike lateral surveillance. This refers, for example, to the way people follow the lives and activities of their relatives, family, and friends on social media, such as Facebook, Twitter/X, formerly Foursquare, etc. Information is displayed publicly or shared with a community of followers, with each person being aware that they are, in effect, being observed.
• Participatory surveillance (Albrechtslund, 2008): involves an active monitoring of oneself and others in a productive and social way. This refers to the capacity offered by social media for users to maintain social ties through each other’s posts, or to construct their identity in the digital sphere through the interactions these platforms enable. Here, seeing and being seen produces positive effects for the individual.
• Self-surveillance (Meyrowitz, 2007): the way in which individuals record themselves, or invite others to do so, in order to potentially revisit this data at a later time or in a different place. This includes, for example, practices associated with the quantifiedself movement and self-tracking, as well as sharing one’s athletic activities on platforms such as Strava.
• Voluntary, or participatory, panopticon (Whitaker): the voluntary submission to corporate surveillance. For Reg Whitaker, this refers to all the practices of profiling and activity tracking that have emerged with digital technologies, in communications, in the workplace (e.g., real-time monitoring of individuals’ activities), and by public services (for example, Whitaker cites the case of the U.S. Treasury having access to citizens’ personal financial data), etc.
• Dataveillance (Lupton & Williamson, 2017): a practice aimed at collecting and recording data on children (from before birth through to schooling), leading to their everyday activities being observed, evaluated, and subsequently “disciplined”.

From transparency to vigilance

In this context, transparency is a notion that goes hand in hand with surveillance, its more or less voluntary counterpart, often perceived as positive, whereby individuals as well as organizations share and make visible their data and their professional or personal lives. The thesis of the “end of privacy” was already outlined in 1999 by Reg Whitaker in his book The End of Privacy: How Total Surveillance Is Becoming a Reality, in which he observed the emergence of new means of collecting data and information, ranging from webcams to facial recognition. At the same time, transparency was promoted as a new value throughout the 2000s and into the early 2010s. It was highlighted as a “media, political, and intimate” value, based on “openness, honesty, and the balance of power” (Aïm, 2020). Transparency, or publicness (Jarvis, 2011), thus became a new social and political ideal, with sharing as one of its key modalities. 

Moreover, new forms of injunctions to participate and share have emerged, which the LINC analysed in a 2016 IP Report: “Share!” (Partage ! Motivations et contreparties au partage de soi dans la société numérique). The German philosopher Byung-Chun Han sees in this “digital panopticon” a new form of domination (by platforms and private companies), which no longer consists in silencing individuals, but in making connected subjects speak.

It was also during this period that the open data movement developed worldwide, and particularly in France, promoting the opening up of data and the transparency of public services. One of its aims was to restore power to citizens, who are now able to gain a more precise understanding of public action, and even to promote “distriveillance / shareveillance” (Birchall, 2017), a form of interpellation and pressure to examine and verify the data made available by governments.

Each individual thus becomes both the object and the agent of surveillance, the one being watched and the watcher, within a society and a “state of vigilance” (Foessel, 2016), where state prerogatives are distributed and civil society is called upon to take part in surveillance. Schemes such as “Neighbourhood Watch,” introduced in France as early as 2006, encourage citizens to alert the relevant authorities (police or gendarmerie) if they observe unusual events or behaviours.

In the workplace, surveillance practices are just as widely shared. Video surveillance in the workplace remains an issue for which the CNIL receives numerous complaints each year, facilitated by the declining cost of acquiring equipment and services, and sometimes by a lack of awareness of the applicable legal framework. Workplace monitoring is among the four problematic situations that lead individuals to take action before the CNIL, as discussed in the 2021 IP Report “Scenes From Digital Life” (p. 34).

In terms of management and surveillance, the CNIL had the opportunity, during the COVID crisis, to remind that video conferencing tools and communication platforms are not intended to monitor employees. Moreover, non-digital solutions for organising workspaces, such as open space offices, are often considered spaces of shared surveillance, insofar as everyone feels observed at all times by both their management and their colleagues. These are environments that “prevent any privacy and expose individuals to their own transparency” (Pélegrin-Genel, 2012).

A social phenomenon that raises ethical questions 

The call for a society of vigilance is, according to the philosopher Michael Foessel, cited by Olivier Aïm, part of a “transfiguration of coercive norms into desirable, if not desired, norms”. Participation in, and the internalisation of, surveillance practices are thus adopted by individuals themselves, within public and professional spheres, as we have seen, but also increasingly within family and social relationships. This corresponds to what Lyon and Marx describe as soft surveillance, which complements hard surveillance implemented by authorities. This soft surveillance can be understood as “a software-like version of its extension into everyday life”. Individuals appropriate these practices through the tools available to them, from social media to connected devices, including dedicated applications.

The value of these emerging analytical frameworks developed within Surveillance Studies lies notably in the way they reinsert our own practices into the analysis of surveillance. The aim is to “take into account the negotiations, adjustments, and paradoxes that individuals are led to make in their own practices” (Green and Zurawski, 2015). David Lyon captures this internalisation of surveillance practices in 2018 in his book The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life: “Surveillance culture emerged as people increasingly engaged with surveillance tools. Many monitor the lives of others using social media, for example. At the same time, the ‘others’ make this possible by allowing themselves to be exposed publicly through messages, tweets, posts, and images. Some also engage in surveillance when they become concerned about the information that others hold about them, often large and opaque organisations such as airlines or security agencies” (quoted in Olivier Aïm).

These paradoxes and the appropriation of surveillance were highlighted by Dominique Cardon in 2022 (during a CNIL foresight committee meeting): “we live with uncertainties that we try to reduce: we ask for security. […] Everything is being secured, even our romantic encounters: we need to know in advance whether we have things in common. We should consider a right not to have access to all information”.

The question of how to regulate these practices arises. Indeed, they partly fall outside the scope of data protection rules in that the GDPR “does not apply to the processing of personal data by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity, and thus with no connection to a professional or commercial activity” (Recital 18). However, the devices and services used by individuals are brought to market by companies, which themselves act as data controllers.

Thus, as far as individual uses are concerned, these new social practices can be more complex to grasp, largely because authorities, including the CNIL, do not have the means to intervene. 

This is, for example, the case with domestic video surveillance, for which, given the material impossibility of inspecting the homes of all individuals in breach of the rules, the authority limits itself to recalling the existing legal framework: “Individuals may only film the interior of their property (for example, the inside of the house or apartment, the garden, the private driveway). They are not allowed to film public roads, even for the purpose of securing their vehicle parked in front of their home. They must also not infringe on the privacy of the people being filmed.”

This is also the case with practices such as GPS location sharing between family members, which may be accepted or even desired by those involved, but can also infringe on individuals’ freedoms, and may even be associated with harassment or abusive behaviours.

All these practices, together with the democratisation of technological tools, call into question our relationship to surveillance. This involves reflecting on what a new ethics of surveillance or non-surveillance might look like, as well as a right to uncertainty, and a right not to see or not to know. The title of this article raises the idea of a hypothetical end of surveillance, as if surveillance was now so diluted in our lives that we can no longer clearly grasp its contours. This is a question that could be raised during the ethical event air2024 organised by the CNIL on 19 November 2024. It is also a question that the LINC has chosen to address through a design fiction (available here): a “Surveillance Score” which, in the manner of the Nutri-Score, informs users about the potential level of surveillance embedded in a digital object or service. It is up to each individual to apply their own interpretative framework and to confront their own dilemmas as consumers.