Privacy and Surveillance

Maintaining privacy is a must to many by choice as well as by law. Breaching someone’s confidentiality, disclosing information, intrusion, exposure and distortion are all types of unwanted information distribution.


I believe that everyone should have the right to privacy to do things needed to be done alone or even just to have that time alone.

“Privacy is a fundamental right, essential for freedom, democracy, psychological well-being, individuality, and creativity. It is proclaimed inviolable but decried as detrimental, antisocial, and even pathological” Daniel J Solove Understanding Privacy 2008

We find ourselves in a much more private society as to those in a more primitive age or place.

Living in the most watched city in the world I could definitely believe that surveillance is implicated of both the watchers and the watched. Many people may not know or notice how much of there information is being documented or controlled.


As David Lyon examined in the ‘Surveillance Studies: An Overview’ there are many sites of surveillance such as workplace control, consumer activities, policing and crime control to government administration.

We are constantly being spied on and monitored even without our own permission. Some people may believe that its for our own safety but the modern day surveillance doesn’t stop at CCTV it involves customer profiling which puts together information on you relating to your purchasing patterns and marketing.

With the phenomenon of Facebook, bebo and other social networks were personal information could be easily accessed are we really safe anymore.