1 week ago
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A TikTok comedian recently launched a fake ICE tip line and received dozens of calls – including one from a teacher suggesting agents look into a kindergartener in her class. Governments and companies are the architects of surveillance culture, but civilians are increasingly keen to play a part. And it’s not just our perceived political enemies we’re willing to watch. It’s our friends, neighbours, partners and children.
As corporations and governments tunnel further into our digital lives – hoarding information about where we shop, who we know and what we believe – we’ve grown increasingly comfortable demanding the same access in our personal lives. While multiple apps log our location throughout the day, we demand that our friends also share their real-time movements through Apple’s Find My feature. While OpenAI uses our chat logs to train its models, we peek into the text messages of our partners. And while Palantir analyses social media data to help ICE identify its targets, we record strangers in public without their consent.
Indeed, invasive behaviour that would have shocked us a decade ago now barely registers. I think of the young man I spoke to who had a new co-worker request that he share his location indefinitely because the man “just liked to know where people are”. Or the young woman who parked outside her boyfriend’s house to hack into his text messages using her car’s Bluetooth.
These oversteps may seem like personal failures, but we can’t divorce them from their societal context. When companies are collecting digital clues about your HIV status and sharing them with advertisers, it’s tough to keep track of what’s appropriate. Consumers have become desensitised to mass data collection. In a 2023 report from Pew Research, 73% of American adults said they feel they have little to no control over what companies do with the data collected about them. When asked about the government, that number jumped to 79%. Is it any wonder that people are more tolerant of it in their personal lives as well? Let’s call it trickledown surveillance.
Perhaps the clearest examples of eroding privacy norms come from romantic partnerships, where tracking and monitoring have become widely accepted substitutes for direct communication. In a 2021 study published in Children and Youth Services Review, researchers found that almost 60% of young adults surveyed had experienced “digital monitoring or control” while dating, which the study defined as “using social media/technology to keep track of, intrude on the privacy of, and control the activities of a dating partner”. It’s now normal to scan a partner’s social media profiles for small signs of disloyalty, such as an Instagram “like” on another person’s photo or a tagged photo at an unexpected place. Some people go so far as to pay amateur online sleuths for a full audit of their partner’s digital footprint.
Interpersonal surveillance has also become a staple of family life. Many young people today will grow from kids to teens to young adults without the expansions in privacy that normally come with those transitions. Now, parents regularly track their children’s locations, read their messages and stalk their social media accounts well into young adulthood. The thought that these habits may infringe on the self-respect and autonomy of young people might not occur to parents – especially if they’re busy digitally snooping on each other.
Step out of the home into neighbourhoods and communities and it’s more of the same. Commit a public faux pas – or worse, suffer some humiliation or health crisis – and you may find your name and face blasted to millions of viewers on TikTok. Talking to another adult on an airplane while wearing a wedding ring? Dancing at a party like no one is watching? Complaining to a restaurant employee? These are all offences that could earn you a go-round as the internet’s villain of the day, with onlookers rushing to contact your employer and flood your family with hate messages.
Perhaps all this tracking and recording would be worth it if it strengthened our relationships, but it doesn’t. Rather than building trust with our friends, partners and children over time, we’re short-circuiting the process and relying on technology to close the gaps. At best, our connections become shallower. At worst, the desire for constant visibility turns into control and abuse. Organisations that advocate for victims of domestic violence have repeatedly called on tech companies to rethink tracking features such as Apple’s AirTags that make it easy for abusers to spy on their victims. Many cases of sextortion and sharing of intimate images without consent begin when young people feel pressured to share online logins with controlling partners, attorneys say.
Despite our growing numbness to a culture of surveillance, there are still moments when we snap to attention. When Ring, an Amazon-owned smart doorbell company ran a Super Bowl ad last month telling audiences that it uses AI to scan their front gardens for lost dogs, it sparked a public outcry. Soon after, Ring announced it was cancelling its partnership with surveillance tech firm Flock Safety to build a system that would link neighbourhood cameras and share footage with police.
The Ring debacle is an anomaly. Far more often, invasive new tech is met with apathy or resignation. In a recently leaked internal document revealing Meta’s plans to add facial recognition to its popular Ray-Ban smart glasses, the company suggested that the chaotic political environment in the US could provide a good distraction, as critics would be too overwhelmed by other stories to push back.
Political turmoil may distract from privacy concerns, as Meta hopes, but it could also push them into the spotlight. As government agencies from ICE to the UK’s NHS deepen their relationships with surveillance tech companies, people might find a renewed appetite for resistance – in public and private.
We didn’t ask for the digital panopticon we’re living in, but we don’t have to lend it our eyes and ears. When we decline to monitor and be monitored, we reclaim a slice of the sovereignty tech companies have stolen from us. And in time, we might rediscover the quiet, secret space where love and trust take root.
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Tatum Hunter is a technology journalist based in Brooklyn. She writes on Substack at Bytatumhunter
