LiSS Working Group 3 ‘The Business of Surveillance’ is primarily concerned with the role played private and public sector organizations in the surveillance society. Its empirical focus is on phenomena which surround the collection, analysis and dissemination of personal data for commercial and increasingly security-based ends.  WG3 seeks to promote reflexive and critical thinking about these practices, in terms of their ethics, consequences and political economies.  The consequences to which we attend include, but are not limited to, well established issues in Surveillance Studies, such as questions of proportionality, social sorting, distributive justice and discrimination.

 

However are further concerned with the dynamics of corporate ownership networks in the market for data, the blurring of public and private boundaries within this market, the hybrid institutions and new markets which result, and the clashing of professional networks and identities which influence the very practice of profiling and data mining.

 

Our theorising seeks to incorporate some of these new phenomena as well as new theory which is emerging from the broader fields of marketing, organization, and international relations. We highlight issues of power and resistance as they occur at the level of the embodied consumer, internet user and other subjects in a variety of novel hybrid (on/offline) settings. We also observe counter surveillance strategies at the level of the organization and the state. Of particular interest is the extent to which counter surveillance strategies are formally organized or more informal and transient in nature.

 

We achieve this partly by examining transformations of politics surrounding surveillance as well as seeking to understand the dynamics of surveillance based regulation as it affects the private sector.  We particularly focus on how surveillance becomes embedded into everyday organizational routines, and entangled with pre-existing commercial priorities and rationales. A particular interest is to create new theoretical understandings of visualisation as it becomes a pervasive commercial tool.