The company provides the product to the user and, at the same time, learns something during the process, in particular through the observation of users’ behaviours. He defined this system that traces users’ tastes for marketing as ‘little brother’ (reminiscent of the well-known ‘Big Brother’), a fundamental node of the new economy based on the exchange of benefits where the use of online services gives away access to personal data. The mechanism of online surveillance develops fruitful connections in relation to businesses and capital accumulation that Fuchs described through the concepts of ‘panoptic sorting, mass self-surveillance and personal mass dataveillance’. Following this, added that those who hold access to large data sets of personal information have a crucial tool that allows them to influence behaviours of those whose data are being held.
In this discourse, capital accumulation is another part of the use of systems of surveillance. According to Fuchs, the mechanisms of surveillance present within Web 2.0, following the principles mentioned earlier, is described as mass surveillance. Fuchs focused particular attention on surveillance in relation to social media and commercial logic. Indeed, he explained that ‘with the help of legal mechanisms (terms of use and privacy policies, for instance) most corporations acquire the ownership rights to use and sell user generated content (UGC) and to analyse users’ data and behaviour for implementing thirdparty operated targeted advertisements’.
Furthermore, ‘consumer surveillance’ is another category of surveillance that Turow described which aims at ‘predicting and, in combination with (personalised) advertising, controlling the behaviour of consumers’. This type of surveillance is one of the most popular forms of controlling by businesses and Internet service providers. It also involves mobile phone surveillance, which captures digital communication, real-world locations and movements [geo-tags]. In this case, the productivity of surveillance focuses on user monitoring, data gathering and the exploitation of users’ self-disclosure. Andrejevic defined this dynamic as ‘the work of being watched’.
Considering social media surveillance in relation to businesses, Andrejevic advanced the notion of ‘digital enclosure’ to interpret the virtual essence of the state of surveillance that users experience constantly on the Internet. As he suggested, ‘interactivity promises not a return to the relative lack of anonymity of village life, but rather to a state of affairs in which producers have more information about consumers than ever before, and consumers have less knowledge about and control over how this information is being used’.
Since the imaginary world described by George Orwell through 1984, surveillance has been seen as an invasion of privacy and abuse of power by the nation-state. Nowadays, surveillance has become more pervasive and the act of watching others takes place in many daily activities. In this discourse, the postmodern conception of Liquid Surveillance emphasises individuals’ awareness of the permanent visibility that media produces, as well as its inherent fluidity. As a result, the ubiquitous participation in social media modifies the dynamics between watchers and watched. As Lyon claimed, it is not possible to evade the complex dialectics of watching and being watched because it is still central in the general regulation of human life. Indeed, online users are encouraged to watch other users’ online activities in order to be part of an online social experience.
The radical intensification of the social practices of liking, posting, following and sharing information about people complicates the regulation of online environments. Expanding the concept of privacy towards ensuring the appropriate flows of personal information, Nissenbaum suggests consider privacy as a form of contextual integrity. This framework intends to be a sort of guideline on how to approach the co-presence of values and interests, in relation to privacy expectations. According to Nissenbaum, contextual privacy is ‘preserved when informational norms are respected and violated when informational norms are breached [...] whether or not control is appropriate depends on the context, the types of information, the subject, sender, and recipient’. The concept of contextual integrity helps to understand that privacy plays different roles in different contexts and that it follows different dynamics for different relations, such as corporations-users or users-users. Privacy protection does not only translate into the indiscriminate control of users’ data and metadata, but it is rather also related to the various practices of information sharing depending on different social media contexts. The information that a user shares on Facebook or Tumbler is unlikely to be shared on LinkedIn and vice versa (though of course it is always possible).
The Paradox of Privacy on Social Media Platforms
