Surveillance practices, often suspicious or clandestine, contrast with trusting relationships. In the twenty-first century, surveillance has expanded and intensified into a very complex global phenomenon, involving major corporate activity as well as policing and national security. Data analytics and AI have become commonplace in each form. Corporate surveillance is seen both in data-gathering and analysis done by platforms and in outsourcing government administration and services to internet corporations. Ordinary users of platforms are implicated in surveillance in unprecedented ways, as those surveilled and as those who engage with surveillance themselves. Trust is tangled and eroded in expanding ways, and with it, democracy, which depends on trust. Key factors are the changed conditions of possibility for trust, post-democratic practices of outsourcing and public-private partnerships, and an obsession with new modes of data capture and analysis. Non-values of efficiency, cost-effectiveness, speed and convenience trump human flourishing and the common good. New and different approaches are required to repair trust and recover democracy.

For more information about Prof David Lyon and for registration, please see http://sociology.cass.anu.edu.au/events/surveillance-trust-and-democracy...