I am a Londoner. And like most Londoners I’m not from London. I grew up about as far from a metropolis as you can get, on a farm outside a village on the northwest coast of the Isle of Man. It is a place I love and return to regularly, because the sea air makes me smile. There’s something reassuring about going back to where people have known you for 50 years, but it can also be stifling to live in a place where everyone knows your business. There are reasons I choose London as my home.
One of the beauties of London is the ability to reinvent yourself, to evolve and find new sides to what it means to be you, to shift and change and find your people – and do all that under the invisible cloak of relative anonymity. These are things I love about London, but they also have echoes in the online world, or at least in the utopian version of that world, where we would all be free to connect with like-minded people across all geographical borders, safe in the knowledge no one would ever know who we were.
Anonymity is double-edged: it might give us the freedom to dance like no one’s watching, but it can also lead to bad behaviour with no accountability, as anyone who’s been attacked by online trolls will know. In truth, any feeling of anonymity in cities and online today is a mirage. We may not know our neighbours, but the technology deployed on our streets and in our pockets means we are continually under effective surveillance, and consequent judgement, whether we realise it or not.
Two years of pandemic lockdowns both highlighted and exacerbated the problem. For me, the first lockdown hit just as a I sat down to write my book, Freedom to Think, about the ways technology interferes with our right to freedom of thought. Rereading Orwell’s 1984 felt like a study in anthropology as news cycles churned with new ways to monitor and control us and social media fizzed and popped with disinformation and conspiracy theories. My research into the ways technology is designed to understand, manipulate and judge us, in every aspect of our lives, made me feel that, instead of learning from the dystopian writers of the twentieth century like Orwell and Huxley, we have chosen to model our future on their nightmarish vision.
London is the only city in Europe (excluding Russia) to feature in the top ten most surveilled cities in the world, boasting over 127,000 public CCTV cameras on its streets. Increasingly, surveillance is being extended to use live facial recognition technology in public spaces. Privacy and human rights campaigners have been raising the alarm for years about the risks of widespread facial recognition technology to democratic societies. In addition to the discriminatory impact of technology, they have highlighted its chilling impact on the right to protest, as police record gatherings and check faces against vast databases.
And facial recognition technology is not only about identification and physical surveillance, it is also about mental surveillance. For example, one Israeli company claims: “We reveal personality from facial images at scale to revolutionise how companies, organisations and even robots understand people and dramatically improve public safety, communications, decision-making, and experiences.” In Europe, the Reclaim Your Face movement is campaigning to ban biometric mass surveillance within the European Union as an urgent measure to protect human dignity and human rights. But for now, at least, the industry continues to develop tools to read us for public safety and, more importantly, for profit.
In 1984, Orwell’s hero, Winston Smith, observed “It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in a public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide.” Today, the ubiquity of smartphones, Ring cameras and other personal devices that record our lives mean it is impossible to get out of range of the telescreen.
In the pandemic, the constant surveillance became even more apparent as the public, even in metropolitan cities, stepped up to the task of singling out suspicious behaviour recorded on Ring camera doorbells and circulated around local WhatsApp groups. Perhaps one of the most disturbing things about Matt Hancock’s famous clinch with his aide was not the flagrant disregard for the rules and guidance he brought in, but the fact that, even in the heart of government, in a ministerial office, there is nowhere you aren’t recorded.
With London closed in 2020, the diversity and openness that attracted me to the metropolis were gone. I looked wistfully at the relative freedom on the Isle of Man that led one man to brave the Irish Sea in December 2020 on a jet-ski sled, so he could live it up with his new love in Douglas. Like many others, I dreamed of green hills and fresh air, where the potential for remote working would open up professional opportunities. But while technology allowed many to carry on working, and removed the need for a tiresome and potentially deadly commute during the pandemic, it also turbocharged surveillance in the workplace, and that, it seems, is here to stay.
In the pandemic, the constant surveillance became even more apparent
Workplace monitoring is no longer just in the office or on the factory floor. Our homes and lives are laid bare through the cameras on our laptops. Known as bossware, some employee surveillance systems log keystrokes, take screenshots and can even activate employees’ webcams at home without their knowledge. Remote working has not only blurred the lines between home and work, it has also removed the boundary between public and private.
Workplace surveillance is not only on your work equipment or in the workplace – social media is increasingly scoured for statements that do not fit with your workplace persona. And even the data trails you leave in seemingly private online spaces can be bought and used to reveal who you really are. In 2021, a priest in the US stepped down from the Conference of Catholic Bishops after a newsletter bought his private phone data, including location data from the Grindr app, to reveal he was gay. In a place of tolerance, this wouldn’t matter, but information travels quickly around a world that can be far from tolerant. For him, it cost him his job; in another place, it could cost someone their life. This was not information gathered from government surveillance, it was data available to buy on the open market.
The diversity in a city like London is what makes it attractive. For me, it has never felt cold – it has felt like a space free from censorious judgement. But the scale of surveillance in our societies is changing that perception, because technology is increasingly designed not only to monitor but to judge us. Predictive policing, rolled out in cities around the world, claims it can foresee our predisposition to criminality, stopping the harm before it happens. But critics have flagged the bias in the system, showing it operates like automated small-town prejudice. The risk of pile-ons or workplace censure makes many people wary of sharing their true views on social media, but we can never be off our guard because constant monitoring means anything we do or say could somehow find its way online.
The chance to disappear into the crowd, to spread our wings and reach out to others who have different worldviews to our own – with no one watching – is one of the things that makes cities great. But it is not a given. If we want our cities to retain their intellectual and cultural freedoms, we need to think carefully about what surveillance means, both on our streets and on our screens.
Susie Alegre is an international human rights lawyer and author. Her latest book is Freedom to Think (Atlantic)
