- 11/08/2023
- Category: Commentaries
Author: Archandra Viryasatya Sugama
Editor: M Perdana Karim
There has been an ongoing spark throughout social media highlighting the recent public hearing of Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok, before the United States Congress. Chew was summoned before Congress to testify about his company from the allegation of its security policy that they believe to be malicious, which leads to suspicion of the Chinese government’s involvement in it.[i] It is stated that the US government’s fear of the misuse of 150 million American TikTok users’ data is one of the main reasons behind their plan to ban the China-owned company. The fuss is not without reason. Chinese Communist Party is known for its track record of regularly collecting the data of its citizens, which makes China popular with the term surveillance state.[ii] The government’s oversight of cyberspace is questionable despite the use of advanced technology and regulations binding tech companies to comply with the Data Security Law’s review procedures. This surveillance of data is believed to be the Chinese government’s effort to spread its grip and control over things so that any threats could be predicted and prevented before they may happen. However, many argue that this is an act of violation of people’s privacy and can even be a way for the state to oppress certain groups which are not aligned with the interest of the ones in power. As technology keeps developing and the number of internet users increases, the topic of digital surveillance and its possible impact on people with certain identities is important to discuss.
What is Digital Surveillance, and How Does it Work?
Imagine yourself being watched by a group of people who has access to your personal information on a daily basis. The information which include who you are, where you come from, what your political preference is, and any other particular things. That is the simplest way to explain what digital surveillance is. In other words, digital surveillance can be understood as real-time monitoring or surveillance of the digital footprint that people leave in cyberspace once they connect to the internet.[iii] The transformation of the form of surveillance, in fact, has been affected by the rise of the internet and technology. Existing AI technologies such as geo-locating systems, facial recognition, and biometrics are among the most common technologies that retrieve users’ data for technical purposes. Nowadays, the practice of digital surveillance is being implemented by various actors, including government organizations and private companies. These practices vary from the nearest events that most of us experience on a daily basis, such as micro-targeted publicities on our social media, to the complex ones, such as any monitoring activity that governments do for the purpose of security and intelligence.[iv][v] In Indonesia, we may not realize that since the pandemic, there has been an increase in surveillance by the government through the use of the Peduli Lindungi application to track someone’s travel history and identify its users based on their COVID-19 status. These practices can be implemented with the help of AI technology and platform algorithms that use our personal data once we are connected to the internet and access the application.
Digital Surveillance, Politics, and Identity
Digital surveillance does not always connote negatively. As mentioned before, in many countries, surveillance helps different sectors do certain functions, including health and security. However, digital surveillance is a contested term that ignites critics from those who think that it exacerbates the problem of someone’s right to data privacy.[vi] Although both democratic and authoritarian countries are similar in collecting citizens’ data for their particular purposes, most often used for counter-terrorism and security mechanism, there are differences to some extent in how they practice the legal aspect of the data collection process itself. What later becomes a problem is when the data collected are prone to be abused for the sake of their political interest. There are some shreds of evidence that show how these technologies are reinforcing systemic racism toward certain groups of people in many countries. In the United States, for example, people of color tend to have higher risks of being persecuted because of the bias that the facial recognition feature has on security cameras across public facilities.[vii] Still in the same country but with a different issue, the notorious case of Cambridge Analytica showed us that tech companies are able to track and profile their users based on identity in terms of political references in order to influence individual voters by proliferating micro-targeted ads to them. It was said that Trump’s campaign strategy was also to prevent 3.5 million black Americans from voting by targeting them with misleading ads about Hillary Clinton.[viii] In this case, with the help of a tech company that has access to gather information from its market, Trump’s team was able to abuse their data to pursue their political goals.
In more extreme circumstances, which usually take place in authoritarian countries, abusive digital surveillance can lead to more danger for certain groups of people. In 2022, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) released a report that contains information about how the Chinese government has been oppressing people of Uyghur and other Muslim minority groups. Some of the prominent concerns address how the national law, such as the Counterterrorism Law (CTL) and Criminal Procedure Law (CPL), allow the authorities to implement special acts such as electronic surveillance and data collection on certain personal data, including those that are corresponding to their personal lives and biometric. This “so-called” counter-extremism measurement is mandatory to be adopted by other telecommunication and internet companies and therefore applied to technologies such as facial recognition system-equipped CCTV.[ix] Another form of surveillance also includes highly-controlled personal communication device history that is backed up with analytical technologies. With the applied mass surveillance system and policy, there is a higher chance of discrimination against those marginalized groups that do not comply with the standard that the government sets.
The Future of Digital Surveillance
Eventually, the development of technologies will transform the already existing behaviors into new ones, which in this context is digital surveillance. The cases mentioned above are just among the visible outcomes of the ability of the power holders on controlling data. What is to be concerned with is that there is a need to ensure that this won’t be a new media for the stakeholders to abuse their power and take advantage of the already vulnerable ones only for their political interest. Therefore, those who are responsible for the data collection and processing need to be more transparent and impartial otherwise, digital surveillance can exacerbate discrimination and demonization of groups with specific identities.
[i] Zahn, M. (2023). ‘TikTok faces bans in US and other countries. Here’s why.’ March 1, abcnews. https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tiktok-facing-bans-us-countries/story?id=97528047#:~:text=and%20other%20countries.-,Here’s%20why.,but%20critics%20warn%20of%20overreach.&text=The%20move%20comes%20amid%20fears,data%20to%20the%20Chinese%20government.
[ii] Kuo, M. A. (2022). ‘Surveillance State: Social Control in China.’ October 3, the diplomat. https://thediplomat.com/2022/10/surveillance-state-social-control-in-china/
[iii] Marx, G. T. (2003). ‘A Tack in the Shoe: Neutralizing and Resisting the New Surveillance,’ Journal of Social Issues 59, no. 2 (April 29, 2003): 369–90, https://doi.org/10.1111/1540- 4560.00069; Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard, Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics (Taylor & Francis, 2010)
[iv] Morrison, S. (2021). ‘Why you should care about data privacy even if you have “nothing to hide”,’ Jan 28, Vox. https://www.vox.com/recode/22250897/facebook-data-privacy-collection-algorithms-extremism
[v] Ünver, H. A. (2018). ‘Politics of Digital Surveillance, National Security and Privacy. Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies,’ Center for Economy and Foreign Policy Study, http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep17009
[vi] Wang, J. et. al. (2022). ‘The era of digital surveillance: Authoritarianism vs. democracy?,’ October 18, Oxford Global Society. https://oxgs.org/2022/10/18/the-era-digital-surveillance-authoritarianism-vs-democracy/#_edn1
[vii] Zalnieriute, M. & Cutts, T. (2022). ‘How AI and New Technologies Reinforce Systemic Racism,’ Submission to the Study on Patterns, Policies and Processes Leading Racial Discrimination and on Advancing Racial Justice and Equality for the 54 th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council.
[viii]Sabbagh, D. (2020). ‘Trump 2016 campaign ‘targeted 3.5m black Americans to deter them from voting,’ Sep 28, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/28/trump-2016-campaign-targeted-35m-black-americans-to-deter-them-from-voting
[ix] Feldstein, S. (2022). ‘China’s high-tech surveillance drives oppression of Uyghurs,’ October 27, Bulletin of the Atomic Science. https://thebulletin.org/2022/10/chinas-high-tech-surveillance-drives-oppression-of-uyghurs/
