cause and consequence of inequality of power. The key issue is the surveillance of the less powerful by the more powerful.
The word “surveillance” has connotations of nastiness, but a little reflection reveals that keeping a close watch on others is not inherently bad. For example, it makes sense to keep a close watch on small children to make sure that they do not get hurt. The same applies to the sick and infirm. Many people appreciate someone watching out for them when they are doing something that is potentially risky, such as swimming in the sea or climbing a tall ladder. These are examples of “surveillance” which can be most welcomed.
When people live together, they observe a lot about each other, and this can be considered a type of surveillance. It occurs in families, among friends, and in close-knit communities. Some of the attention in these circumstances may be resented, but much of it is an inevitable consequence of living as a member of a community. It can be a joy to see friends along the street or in a restaurant or to have them visit your home, even though they thereby know more about what you are doing at any particular time.
Most people are not concerned about “surveillance” in such situations. Why not? In some of the cases, such as meeting friends, there is both a mutual agreement to participate and a rough equality of power. But in the case of a parent and a small child, there is an enormous difference in power and no real possibility of informed consent on the child’s part. What makes the close watching in this situation acceptable is the trust implicit in the relationship: the trust that the parent will look after the child. (Of course, this trust may be violated, as when a parent beats or sexually abuses a child. Such actions justify intervention by others, whether family, friends or the state.)
What is normally called surveillance then applies to cases when either there is a substantial power difference or a lack of a trust relationship, or both. A large powerful organisation that collects data on individuals is a typical case. The organisation is able to collect data because it is powerful and becomes more powerful because of the data.
Is the fundamental problem the surveillance or the inequality in power? They are linked, so perhaps these two things can’t be easily distinguished.
Note that I have couched this discussion in terms of surveillance and power rather than in terms of privacy and individual rights. Many of the writers in this area focus on privacy, assuming that there is a right to privacy and that violations of individual privacy must be weighed up against other competing values (such as increasing efficiency or stopping crime). This language of privacy and rights is typical of liberalism. It assumes that individuals are isolated entities who have agreed to participate in society according to a “contract.”
There are a lot of problems with this picture. Individuals are not isolated and autonomous but are inevitably products of and participants in society. Furthermore, few individuals can be said to have genuinely agreed to their place in society — as if there is any real alternative!
Another problem with the focus on privacy is that privacy means different things to different people and means different things in different cultures. (Even so, there may be commonalities in attitudes to privacy across the most divergent cultures.[4]) But people who have different concepts of privacy may agree to oppose particular types of surveillance.
A focus on privacy directs attention to the individual whose privacy is invaded; a focus on surveillance directs attention to the exercise of power and to the groups that undertake it. Whether antisurveillance is a better rallying point than privacy, though, remains to be seen.
Reform solutions
One way proposed to protect privacy is to ensure that all the people who have access to information collected about members of the public deal with it in a “responsible” fashion. This means that those who deal with or have responsibility for information — such as computer administrators, police, government bureaucrats, telephone technicians and personnel managers — should have the highest personal standards. For example, they should use the information only for the purposes for which it was collected. Codes of ethics are sometimes proposed to set a standard of behaviour.
Most bank managers, marketeers, hospital administrators, government officials and the like are responsible people who are unlikely to misuse the information at their disposal. But all it takes is a minority of less responsible people for serious breaches of confidentiality to occur.
However, even if every single person with access to confidential data was absolutely trustworthy, this would not solve the problem. This is because there are enormous bureaucratic pressures to extend the use of data about individuals for, from the organisation’s point of view, very sound reasons. The tax office wants to collect data to ensure that all pay their fair share of tax, so that enough money is available for essential public spending. Government bureaucracies keep data on welfare recipients in order to make sure that only those who really need benefits actually receive them; with limited funds, making payments to those who don’t need them means less for those who do. Marketeers collect information on consumers in order to increase their profits, to be sure, but they sincerely believe they are aiming to provide a better service or product to those who really need it. Police see surveillance as necessary to protect the community from serious crime.
One may argue that these attitudes are rationalisations for policies that benefit those defending the surveillance, namely the salaries of government bureaucrats, etc. But it would be unfair to accuse people of bad intentions. It is only a tiny minority of snoopers who gather information for the purpose of blackmail. Almost all surveillance is carried out by well-meaning people with what they believe are the most worthy ends in mind.
Furthermore, there is a lot of public support for surveillance to stop cheats and crooks. Bureaucratic and popular pressures often reinforce each other, egged on by media stories of welfare abuse or dangerous criminals.
When a government department proposes to compare tax records with lists of recipients of unemployment benefits, a central motivation is to save money by exposing those on good salaries who are also improperly obtaining unemployment payments. What could be more sensible, indeed laudable? Ensuring that everyone in the system is highly responsible will eliminate some of the abuses but will not address the bureaucratic and commercial pressures for ever greater collection and combination of data about individuals. In summary, codes of ethics and other methods to ensure responsible use of information are all very well but don’t address institutional pressures to expand surveillance.
Another way of opposing surveillance is for governments to pass laws and establish agencies and systems to protect privacy. Many writers on privacy favour this approach. Laws, regulations and privacy commissions can, indeed, accomplish many things. They can allow citizens to see and correct files held on them; they can outlaw certain practices, such as sharing of databases; they can ensure that privacy considerations become a factor in policy making; they can establish organisations that keep tabs on technical developments; they can impose penalties on violators of people’s privacy.
