"Surveillance, Power, and Everyday Life" by David Lyon

This reading by David Lyon is Chapter 19 in the Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies, published in 2009. David Lyon is sociologist and a professor at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. He is the director of the Surveillance Studies Center, and he has published and collaborated on quite a few books on this topic, such as Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation, Eyes Everywhere: The Global Growth of Camera Surveillance, and Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. There aren't any accessible reviews of the specific reading we were given, but there are a number of other authors who have written on similar viewpoints. Examples include Sustainability through surveillance: ICT discourses in design documents by Baki Cakici, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life by Kirstie Ball, and The Public Domain: Surveillance in Everyday Life by Alice Marwick.

In the reading, Lyon talks about advancement of surveillance in our society. As ICT has developed, so too has surveillance. But it's not just physical surveillance like a security camera or tapping into our cellphones, it's information surveillance that has become a part of society. Our online experiences are heavily monitored, and companies use that information to classify and categorize us. Lyon acknowledges that surveillance has been around in different forms for a long time, but it is the recent developments in ICT that have taken it to the next level. He uses the term "dataveillance" which was coined by Roger Clarke in 1988 to refer to just how much of our data is really being watched. It's not just web-browsing data either, it's shopping habits, banking, and information sharing. This leads him to question whether we are seeing the end of privacy. There is so much available data out there on us that he speculates as to how much privacy we have left. The 9/11 terrorist attacks is what sparked the major increase in surveillance, but much of the dataveillance is used for commercial purposes instead of safety purposes. As the ICT has opened up security surveillance, marketing companies have followed suit. We end up getting sorted by companies in order to better serve and understand us, but there are many issues that go along with that, particularly generalizations and assumptions made by institutions with limited data. There is a balance between security and marketing that comes with this surveillance and sorting, but Lyon argues that it does more harm than good. ICT has created an industry of surveillance, and more and more the surveillance is hidden. It brings up ethical issues when a person's data, especially sensitive data, is taken without their knowledge or permission, and as a sociologist, Lyon finds that unsettling. He argues that we "need to go beyond tired notions of 'privacy'" and we need "greater accountability in organizations processing personal data" and "greater awareness among publics, politicians, and policy makers."