Ball and Snider define the surveillance-industrial complex in terms of the heightened usefulness of them ever since they were emerged from military priorities. As they say, it highlights ” race the connections between the massive multinational conglomerates that manufacture, distribute and promote technologies of ‘surveillance’, and the institutions of social control and civil society.” (Ball& Snider). This entails the idea that it is related to political economy, and it exposes and analyzes the intersections between the capital and liberals, where the growth of importance of the surveillance society has been heightened, but as a cause of that, it has serious dangerous consequences. Although it emerged from military and war surveillance, and into social space. This action has changed overtime in the twentieth century, marking two dominant players in society- the state and the corporate.
Hache and Jansen say surveillance is an important matter as the “content is created by you and others actively publishing information, which includes what you write, publish and share, as well as content that other people create about you. Content can be scanned for key words which are considered harmful to the status quo, identifying whoever created the content as a human rights defender”(Hache &Jansen, 2018). Therefore,surveillance according to (Hache &Jansen, 2018) promotes the idea that there are two different parties considered to be importance and that is you and the people who share your information. You have power in what content you provide and share, but you do not necessarily control the content that is crated about you.
Moreover, metadata- “which is created so that the basic infrastructure of our digital systems, including the Internet and our mobile phone networks, can work properly. For example, the metadata of an email contains the sender, recipient, time and date, sometimes the IP address and subject line. Metadata enables your email to be delivered correctly, your files to be found on your computer, and your smartphone to receive text messages and phone calls from around the world almost instantaneously” (Hache& Jansen, 2018). This reveals that different platforms as well as the utilization of phone decides, can track different information that you might consider as “private” to your friends and family, but in other light is considered to be public for the people who are using surveillance to track you. An example of this, is the interconnectedness between different social platforms that allows the access of information of your age, photos, likings, websites that you have visited. In turn, you could see that by the different promotional ads that take place on the sides of your screens or through sponsorship advertisements on your social media. This could be seen as very dangerous and harmful, as nothing is private anymore, and could be easily accessed through others, promoting political economy.
References
Ball, K., & Snider, L. (2013). The surveillance-industrial complex: a political economy of surveillance. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Privacy, Surveillance and Data Tracking: Why Does it Matter for Human Rights Defenders? (2018). Retrieved from https://www.ritimo.org/Privacy-Surveillance-and-Data-Tracking-Why-Does-it-Matter-for-Human-Rights
Media and Society 