The last two weeks we’ve been watching the BBC2 documentary series Who’s Watching You? about how Britain has become “one of the most watched places in the world”. For anybody paying attention to privacy issues there was little news, but what it did well was providing concrete examples of what for most of us is a fairly abstract fear.
The loss of our privacy through ubiquitous surveillance is one of the greatest hidden issues of the early twentyfirst century. It’s not just that new technology has made it easier to spy on us, but the way in which both government and business have embraced this technology, especially in the last decade or so, without too much public protest. For most of us this remains a theoretical issue unless it interferes with our daily lives. Which is why speed cameras are so much more loathed than CCTV cameras: one gets you fined, the other doesn’t. (And why there are so many fewer speeding cameras than CCTV cameras: one gets voters mad, the other doesn’t). What the programme did well was showing how this hidden surveillance could and did impinge on the lives of ordinary, middleclass people. What it did less well was taken a moral stand beyond “it’s complicated”.
One example I noticed in the second episode was that of the AA driver sacked for “making fraudelous use of company time”. The company’s timekeeping software reported that he had signed off too late after helping a customer, claiming a few minutes more than he needed, as well as arriving back from lunch three minutes late. That was enough for his managers to go over his record with a fine tooth comb, finding more “irregularities” and finally sacking him over it. He took his case to tribunal and won, as he had been smart enough to keep his own records. The narrator then went into his spiel about how this showed that surveillance can get you the cold facts, but not the context and that just relying on these facts can lead to the wrong conclusions. What he misses is a much more important point: that employees shouldn’t be subject to this sort of time management system in the first place.