Pandemic Surveillance. David Lyon
– sometimes enabled by changed regulations or laws – will become permanent features of society.
In the concluding chapter, “Doorway to Hope,” threads are pulled together. The negative aspects of pandemic surveillance are not inevitable or inescapable. In a future pandemic, things could be done differently – and, indeed, lessons from COVID-19 could also be learned for a post-pandemic world. A major issue is the use of data within surveillance devices, apps and systems. “Tech-solutionism” is a palpable problem – there’s more than one way to achieve results.
This book points to a different way, to start with people and public health, and not with technology. And if aspects of pandemic surveillance are unfair, then a different approach is to begin by aiming for “data justice.” This is the quest for fairness in the ways in which people are made visible, represented and treated – and it’s one of those things that makes possible human flourishing and the common good. This approach goes beyond privacy and also makes seeking alternatives everyone’s business. Indeed, it strikes a note of hope, a doorway through which all may walk.
Notes
1 1 See Amy L. Fairchild, Ronald Bayer and James Colgrove, Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State and Disease Surveillance in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and https://daily.jstor.org/john-snow-and-the-birth-of-epidemiology. See also Lorna Weir and Eric Mykhalovskiy, Global Health Vigilance: Creating a World on Alert (London: Routledge, 2010).
2 2 David M. Morens, Gregory K. Folkers and Anthony S. Fauci, “What is a pandemic?” The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 200 (7) 2009: 1018–21.
3 3 www.who.int/immunization/monitoring_surveillance/burden/vpd/en.
4 4 Robert Fahey and Airo Hino, “COVID-19, digital privacy and the social limits on data-focussed public health responses,” International Journal of Information Management, 55 (December) 2020: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7328565.
5 5 Eun-Young Jeong, “South Korea tracks virus patients’ travels – and publishes them online,” The Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2020.
6 6 Surveillance capitalism was first described by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney in “Surveillance capitalism: Monopoly finance capital, the military-industrial complex and the digital age,” Monthly Review, 66 (3) 2014: https://monthlyreview.org/2014/07/01/surveillance-capitalism; and Vincent Mosco, To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World (Boulder: Paradigm, 2014); but its best-known analyst is Shoshana Zuboff in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).
7 7 www.vice.com/en/article/bv8ga4/sidewalk-labs-abandons-its-smart-city-in-toronto.
8 8 Sidney Fussell, “The city of the future is a data-collection machine,” The Atlantic, November 21, 2018: www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/11/google-sidewalk-labs/575551.
9 9 Julia Powles, “Why are we giving away our most sensitive health data to Google?” The Guardian, July 5, 2017.
10 10 Albert Camus, The Plague (English trans. of La Peste) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960).
11 11 Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World (London: Cape, 2017).
12 12 Nurhak Polat, “Dijital pandemi gözetimi, beden politikalari ve esitsizlikler” (“Digital pandemic surveillance, body politics and inequalities”), Feminist Approaches in Culture and Politics, 41 (Autumn) 2020. The English translation of the quotation is courtesy of the author.
13 13 David Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2018). See also Daniel Trottier, Qian Huang, and Rashid Gabdulkahov, “Covidiots as global acceleration of local surveillance practices,” Surveillance & Society, 19 (1) 2021: 109–13: https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/14546/9538.
14 14 Ian Hacking, “Making up people,” The London Review of Books, 28 (16) August 1996: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n16/ian-hacking/making-up-people.
15 15 The term is from Evgeny Mozorov, To Save Everything, Click Here (New York: Public Affairs, 2014).
16 16 Rob Kitchin, “Civil liberties or public health or civil liberties and public health? Using surveillance technologies to tackle the spread of COVID 19,” Space and Polity, 24 (3) 2020: 362–81: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13562576.2020.1770587. Prominent examples of the “silver bullet” of solutionism for the pandemic are contact tracing apps and vaccines. They do indeed help, but in limited fashion.
17 17 David Lyon, Surveillance after September 11 (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).
18 18 Sumit Ganguly, “India’s not as safe as you think it is,” Foreign Policy, April 26, 2019: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/26/indias-not-as-safe-as-you-think-it-is-mumbai-attacks.
19 19 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008).
20 20 Naomi Klein, “The screen New Deal,” The Intercept, May 8, 2021: https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine.
21 21 See https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/05/1064752.
22 22 This book answers a call from Martin French and Torin Monahan for research that frames the pandemic as a social problem, examining among other things vulnerability and structural inequality in relation to surveillance. See “Dis-ease surveillance: How might Surveillance Studies address COVID-19?” Surveillance & Society, 18 (1), 2020: 1–11.
23 23 Sebastian Klovig Skelton, interview with Shoshana Zuboff: “Surveillance capitalism in the age of COVID-19,” Computer Weekly, May 13, 2020: www.computerweekly.com/feature/Surveillance-capitalism-in-the-age-of-Covid-19.
24 24 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, 15 (1) 2003: 11–40: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/modules/postcol_theory/mbembe_22necropolitics22.pdf. See also Namrata Verghese, “What is necropolitics? The political calculation of life and death,” Teen Vogue, March 10, 2021: www.teenvogue.com/story/what-is-necropolitics.
25 25 Deborah Lupton, “Digital health and the coronavirus crisis,” Medium: https://deborahalupton.medium.com/digital-health-and-the-coronavirus-crisis-three-sociological-perspectives-10ec9e01ade4.
26 26 H. Caren Ates, Ali K. Yetisen, and Can Dincer, “Wearable devices for the detection of COVID-19,”