Government & corporate surveillance¶
The garden has eyes. And they’re not just the owls.
Forget tin-foil hats — you’ll need a whole greenhouse of lead if you want to opt out of this one. Surveillance isn’t just some dystopian fantasy involving trench coats and wiretaps. It’s here, it’s ambient, and it’s quietly harvesting your compost habits to predict next season’s yield — whether you like it or not.
Let’s talk about the two-headed hydra of surveillance: the state and the market. They don’t always get along, but when it comes to tracking your every move, they’re practically holding hands.
Government surveillance: Big Brother got an upgrade¶
Governments — especially in urban centres — are deploying surveillance tech that makes 20th-century spooks look like amateur botanists fumbling with a cactus. Key examples include:
Facial recognition in public spaces: You don’t need to shoplift to end up in a facial recognition database. Walk past a shop, take a train, or stand in a queue at a concert — congratulations, your face may have been scanned, tagged, and matched to a government or commercial ID dataset. All without any meaningful consent, of course.
License Plate Readers (LPRs): Mounted on street lamps, bridges, and police cruisers, these can track where your car goes and when. In many places, this data is stored for years — just in case you ever need retroactive suspicion applied.
Transit card tracking: Every tap of your Oyster card or similar system is a breadcrumb. In isolation, mundane. In aggregate, revealing — patterns, routines, anomalies. It’s location history wrapped in convenience.
“Smart city” infrastructure: Sounds progressive, right? But what if every traffic cam, public Wi-Fi login, and Bluetooth beacon is just another vine wrapping around your movements, forming a full pattern of your life? Your commute, your coffee stops, your protests — all logged and analysed.
Often, these systems are installed under the banner of “public safety.” But as history (and leaked procurement contracts) show, they’re also useful for crowd control, tracking marginalised groups, and retroactive investigations of anyone who looks suspicious. Spoiler: “suspicious” is in the eye of whoever owns the CCTV feed.
Corporate surveillance: Your data, their harvest¶
Corporations have a different motive — not order, but profit — and their tools are just as insidious. They’re not interested in what you do as much as how it can be monetised.
In-store facial analytics: Retailers use facial recognition to track dwell time (how long you linger in front of a shelf), emotional response, estimated age, and gender. This helps “optimise” shelf layout. And, of course, feeds back into your customer profile.
Behavioural tagging: Shopping malls and event venues use your phone’s Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to follow you around like a digital tail. Where did you enter? How long did you spend in the food court? Which stalls did you ignore?
Heat maps and footfall analysis: Your body isn’t sacred. It’s a data point. Cameras track how crowds move and cluster. Combined with purchase logs and loyalty schemes, this produces rich behavioural profiles — often stored indefinitely.
And it doesn’t stop at the edge of private property. Corporations increasingly partner with local governments to “manage urban environments,” meaning public data (CCTV, sensors, even social media feeds) gets quietly piped into private systems. Surveillance capitalism and state surveillance are not separate forces — they’re co-conspirators in your digital domestication.
You are not being watched because you are dangerous. You’re being watched because you are profitable. And if you happen to be dangerous and profitable? Oh dear. Better check under the compost heap.