Résumés
Abstract
Why do people voluntarily give away their personal data to private companies? In this paper, we show how data sharing is experienced at the level of Tesla car owners. We regard Tesla cars as luxury surveillance goods for which the drivers voluntarily choose to share their personal data with the US company. Based on an analysis of semi-structured interviews and observations of Tesla owners’ posts on Facebook groups, we discern three elements of luxury surveillance: socializing, enjoying, and enduring. We conclude that luxury surveillance can be traced back to the social bonds created by a gift economy.
Keywords:
- luxury surveillance,
- data sharing,
- Tesla,
- sentry mode,
- gift economy
Parties annexes
Bibliography
- Ahmed, Salim, Rebecca J. Haines-Saah, Arfan R. Afzal, Helen Tam-Tham, Mohammad Al Mamun, Brenda R. Hemmelgarn, and Tanvir C. Turin. 2017. User‐Driven Conversations About Dialysis Through Facebook: A Qualitative Thematic Analysis. Nephrology 22 (4): 301–307.
- Albrechtslund, Anders. 2008. Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance. First Monday 13 (3): https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v13i3.2142.
- Albrechtslund, Anders. 2021. Participatory Surveillance: Sharing Our Life Online. London: Taylor & Francis Group.
- Alfonsi, Alfonso, and Maresa Berliri. 2021. Science, Ethics, and Responsible Research: The Case of Surveillance. Ethical Issues in Covert. Security and Surveillance Research 8: 17–28.
- Andrejevic, Mark. 2002. The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Explotation of Self-Disclosure. Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2): 230–248.
- Andrejevic, Mark. 2007. iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.
- Andrejevic, Mark. 2012. Ubiquitous Surveillance. In Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, edited by Kirstie Ball, Kevin Haggerty and David Lyon, 91–98. New York: Routledge.
- Bagwell, Laurie, and Douglas Bernheim. 1996. Veblen Effects in a Theory of Conspicuous Consumption. The American Economic Review 86 (3): 349–373.
- Ball, Kirstie. 2009. Exposure: Exploring the Subject of Surveillance. Information, Communications and Society 12 (5): 630–657.
- Ball, Kirstie. 2016. All consuming surveillance: surveillance as marketplace icon. Consumption Markets & Culture 20(2): 95–100.
- Ball, Kirstie. 2022. Surveillance in the Workplace: Past, Present, and Future. Surveillance & Society 20 (4): 455–461.
- Belle, Nicola, Paola Cantarelli, and Paul Battagli. 2021. To Consent, or Not to Consent? The Publicness Effect on Citizens’ Willingness to Grant Access to Personal Data in the Face of a Health Crisis. Journal of European Public Policy 28 (5): 782–800.
- Bietz, Matthew, Kevin Patrick, and Cinnamon Bloss. 2019. Data Donation as a Model for Citizen Science Health Research. Citizen Science: Theory and Practice 4 (1): 1–11.
- Bottoms, Anthony. 2007. The Relationship between Theory and Research in Criminology. In Doing Research on Crime and Justice, edited by Roy King and Emma Wincup, 75–116. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Bowen, Glenn. 2006. Grounded Theory and Sensitizing Concepts. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 5 (3): 12–23.
- Bryman, Alan. 2016. Social Research Methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Büschel, Isabell, Rostane Mehdi, Anne Cammilleri, Yousri Marzouki, and Bernice Elger. 2014. Protecting Human Health and Security in Digital Europe: How to Deal With the “Privacy Paradox”? Science and Engineering Ethics 20: 639–658.
- Caltrider, Jen, Misha Rykov, and Zoë MacDonald. 2023. It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy. Privacy Not Included, September 6. https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/ [accessed March 17, 2025].
- CBS. 2019. Aantal volledig elektrische auto’s verdubbeld. May 10. https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2019/19/aantal-volledig-elektrische-auto-s-verdubbeld [accessed January 28, 2025].
- Costello, Leesa, Marie-Louise McDermott, and Ruth Wallace. 2017. Netnography: Range of Practices, Misperceptions and Missed Opportunities. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 16 (1): 1–16.
- Cousineau, Luc, Brian Kumm, and Callie Schultz. 2023. Surveillance, Capitalism, Leisure, and Data: Being Watched, Giving, Becoming. Leisure Sciences 45 (5): 451–474.
- Diphoorn, Tessa. 2021. Emic Security: An Anthropological Approach to Security. In The Political Anthropology of Internationalized Politics, edited by Sarah Biecker and Klaus Schlichte, 97–114. Lanham, UK: Rowman & Littlefield.
- Duran Frances, Susan Wilson, and David Carroll. 2005. Putting Administrative Data to Work: A Toolkit for State Agencies on Advancing Data Integration and Data Sharing Efforts to Support Sound Policy and Program Development. Farmington, CT: Child Health and Development Institute of Connecticut.
- Durand, Cedric. 2020. Technoféodalisme: Critique de l’économie Numérique. Paris, FR: Zones.
- Eski, Yarin, and Marc Schuilenburg. 2022. On Tesla: Balancing Sustainable Car Connectivity, Silent Lethality and Luxury Surveillance. Criminological Encounters 5 (1): 234–251.
- Fontes, Catarina, Ellen Hohma, Caitlin C. Corrigan, and Christoph Lütge. 2022. AI-Powered Public Surveillance Systems: Why We (Might) Need Them and How We Want Them. Technology in Society 71: 102–137.
- Fusch, Patricia, Gene Fusch, and Lawrence Ness. 2028. Denzin’s Paradigm Shift: Revisiting Triangulation in Qualitative Research. Journal of Social Change 1: 19–32.
- Gandy, Oscar. 1993. The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information. Boulder, CO: Westview.
- Gijlswijk, Rene van, Emiel van Eijk, Elisah van Kempen, Norbert Ligterink, and Evie Cox. 2018. Inputs and Considerations for Estimating Large Scale Uptake of Electric Vehicles in the Dutch Passenger Car Fleet up to 2030. The Hague, NL: TNO.
- Gilliard, Chris, and David Golombia. 2021. Luxury Surveillance: People Pay a Premium for Tracking Technologies That Get Imposed Unwillingly on Others. Real Life Magazine, July 6. https://reallifemag.com/luxury-surveillance/ [accessed April 24, 2025].
- Goffman, Erving. 2002. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Garden City.
- Gouldner, Alvin. 1960. The Norm of Reciprocity: A Preliminary Statement. American Sociological Review 25 (2): 161–178.
- Hartawidjaja, Gabriele, and Anna Amalyah. 2023. Influencer’s Trustworthiness for Car Purchase. Quantitative Economics and Management Studies 4 (1): 168–174.
- Hedges & Company. 2024. Tesla Owner Demographics: Income, Age, Gender, and More. November. https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/11/tesla-owner-demographics/ [accessed March 17, 2025].
- Helicase21. 2024. Tesla Owners Buying Up “Insane” Number of Anti-Elon Musk Bumper Stickers. Reddit, November 18. www.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/1gu97l8/tesla_owners_buying_up_insane_number_of_antielon/ [accessed April 24, 2025].
- Hillebrand, Kirsten, Lars Hornuf, Benjamin Müller, and Daniel Vrankar. 2023. The Social Dilemma of Big Data: Donating Personal Data to Promote Social Welfare. Information and Organization 33 (1): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2023.100452.
- Hotz, Joseph, Robert Goerge, Julie Balzekas, and Francis Margolin. 1998. Administrative Data for Policy-Relevant Research: Assessment of Current Utility and Recommendations for Development. Chicago, IL: Joint Center for Poverty Research.
- Jolly, Jasper. 2025. Protesters Target Tesla Showrooms in Us over Elon Musk’s Government Cost-Cutting. The Guardian, February 16. www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/16/protesters-target-tesla-stores-in-us-over-elon-musks-cost-cutting [accessed March 17, 2025].
- Jussen Ilka, Julia Schweihoff, Valentin Dahms, Frederik Möller, and Boris Otto. 2023. Data Sharing Fundamentals: Definition and Characteristics. In Proceedings of the 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Maui, Hawaii, January 3–6, 3685–3694. https://hdl.handle.net/10125/103083.
- Karas, Stan. 2002. Enhancing the Privacy Discourse: Consumer Information Gathering as Surveillance. Journal of Technology Law and Privacy 7 (1): 30–63.
- Kendall, Judy. 1999. Axial Coding and the Grounded Theory Controversy. Western Journal of Nursing Research 21 (6): 743–757.
- Kerr, Dara. 2025. “I’m Selling the Nazi Mobile”: Tesla Owners Offload Cars After Musk’s Fascist-Style Salutes. The Guardian, March 2. www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/mar/02/tesla-owners-selling-musk [accessed March 17, 2025].
- Kerr, Dara, and Nick Robins-Early. 2025. Eggings, Swastikas and Dog Poop: Tesla Bears Brunt of People’s Ire Against Musk. The Guardian, March 15. www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/15/vandalized-tesla-elon-musk-trump [accessed March 17, 2025].
- Kharlamov, Alexander, Roland Hohmann, and Glann Parry. 2023. Data Sharing Decisions: Perceptions and Intentions in Healthcare. Strategic Change 32 (6): 223–237.
- Kienscherf, Markus. 2022. Surveillance Capital and Post-Fordist Accumulation: Towards a Critical Political Economy of Surveillance-for-Profit. Surveillance & Society 20 (1): 18–29.
- Kitchin, Rob. 2014. The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences. London: Sage.
- Komter, Aafke. 1996. The Social and Psychological Significance of Gift Giving in the Netherlands. In The Gift. An Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Aafke Komter, 107–118. Amsterdam, NL: Amsterdam University Press.
- Kostkova, Patty. 2018. Disease Surveillance Data Sharing for Public Health: The Next Ethical Frontiers. Life Sciences, Society and Policy 14: 16–21.
- Kozinets, Robert. 2002. The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography for Marketing Research in Online Communities. Journal of Marketing Research 39 (1): 61–72.
- Krutzinna, Jenny, and Luciano Floridi. 2019. The Ethics of Medical Data Donation. Cham, CH: Springer.
- Kurt, Anita, Hope M. Kincaid, Charity Curtis, Lauren Semler, Matthew Meyers, Melanie Johnson, Beth A. Careyva, Brian Stello, Timothy J. Frield, Mark C. Knouse, John C. Smulian, and Jeanne L. Jacoby. 2017. Factors Influencing Participation in Clinical Trials: Emergency Medicine vs. Other Specialties. Western Journal of Emergency Medicine: Integrating Emergency Care with Population Health 18 (5): 846–855.
- Lazzarato, Maurizio. 1996. Immaterial Labour. In Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Michael Hardt and Paul Virno, 133–147. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press.
- Levitt, Steven, and John List. 2011. Was There Really a Hawthorne Effect at the Hawthorne Plant? An Analysis of the Original Illumination Experiments. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3 (1): 224–238.
- Li, Yuhang, Jinru Lin, and Shuning Xu. 2021. Analysis of Tesla’s Business Model: A Comparison with Toyota. In Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Financial Management and Economic Transition (FMET 2021), Guangzhou, China, August 27–29, 30–39. https://doi.org/10.2991/aebmr.k.210917.006.
- Mauss, Marcel. 2002 [1923–1924]. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge.
- Merrifield, Andy. 2014. The Entrepreneur’s New Clothes. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 96 (4): 389–391.
- Not a Tesla App. 2023. Tesla Reveals Data Privacy Details: Which Data Is Used and What Remains Private. March 8. https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/1243/tesla-reveals-data-privacy-details-which-data-is-used-and-what-remains-private [accessed March 17, 2025].
- Percy-Campbell, Jessica, Jacob Buchan, Charlene H. Chu, Andria Bianchi, Jesse Hoey, and Shehroz S. Khan. 2024. User Perception of Smart Home Surveillance: An Integrative Review. Surveillance & Society 22 (3): 304–324.
- Piatak, Jaclyn, and Stephen Holt. 2020. Prosocial Behaviors: A Matter of Altruism or Public Service Motivation? Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 30 (3): 504–518.
- Pickering, Brian, Michael Boniface, Silke Roth, Katie Baker, and Steve Taylor. 2024. Person-Centred Data Sharing: Empirical Studies in Private Individuals’ Attitudes. Open Research Europe 4 (84): https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/4-84.
- Pilgrim, Katharina, and Sabine Bohnet-Joschko. 2022. Donating Health Data to Research: Influential Characteristics of Individuals Engaging in Self-Tracking. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19 (15): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9368330/.
- Pillavin, Jane, and Peter Callero. 1991. Giving Blood: The Development of an Altruistic Identity. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Pridmore, Jason. 2012. Consumer Surveillance: Context, Perspectives and Concerns in the Personal Information Economy. In Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, edited by David Lyon, Kevin D. Haggerty and Kirstie Ball, 321–329. London: Routledge.
- Pridmore, Jason, and Detlev Zwick. 2011. Marketing and the Rise of Commercial Consumer Surveillance. Surveillance & Society 8 (3): 269–277.
- Sadowski, Jathan. 2019. When Data Is Capital: Datafication, Accumulation, and Extraction. Big Data & Society 6 (1): https://doi.org/10.1177 / 2053951718820549.
- Sandoval, Marisol. 2013. A Critical Empirical Case Study of Consumer Surveillance on Web 2.0. In Internet and Surveillance, edited by Christian Fuchs, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund, and Marisol Sandoval, 167–189. New York: Routledge.
- Schuilenburg, Marc. 2024. Making Surveillance Public: Why You Should Be More Woke About AI and Algorithms. The Hague, NL: Eleven International Publishing.
- Schuilenburg, Marc, and Rik Peeters. 2017. Gift Politics: Exposure and Surveillance in the Anthropocene. Crime, Law and Social Change (68) 5: 563–578.
- Shah, Nisha, J. Viberg Johansson, E. Haraldsdóttir, H.B. Bentzen, S. Coy, D. Mascalzoni, G.A. Jónsdóttir, and J. Kaye. 2021. Governing Health Data Across Changing Contexts: A Focus Group Study of Citizen’s Views in England, Iceland, and Sweden. International Journal of Medical Informatics 156: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2021.104623.
- Skatova, Anya, and James Goulding. 2019. Psychology of Personal Data Donation. Plos One 14 (11): https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224240.
- Soellner, Michaela, and Joerg Koenigstorfer. 2022. Motive Perception Pathways to the Release of Personal Information to Healthcare Organizations. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 22 (1): https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-022-01986-4 .
- SpaceX. 2017. Making Life Multiplanetary. September 28. www.spacex.com/media/making_life_multiplanetary_transcript_2017.pdf [accessed: April 13, 2024].
- Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
- Stanley, Jay. 2023. Tesla Camera Scandal is the Latest Lesson in Dangers of Letting Companies Record You. ACLU, April 6. www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tesla-camera-scandal-is-the-latest-lesson-in-dangers-of-letting-companies-record-you [accessed March 17, 2025].
- Tesla. 2023. Environmental Impact. https://www.tesla.com/impact/environment [accessed January 30, 2025].
- Thurlow, Crispin, and Adam Jaworski. 2006. The Alchemy of the Upwardly Mobile: Symbolic Capital and the Stylization of Elites in Frequent-Flyer Programmes. Discourse & Society 17 (1): 99–135.
- Tracy, Sarah. 2019. Qualitative Research Methods: Collecting Evidence, Crafting Analysis, Communicating Impact. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
- Trein, Philipp, and Frederic Varone. 2023. Citizens’ Agreement to Share Personal Data for Public Policies: Trust and Issue Importance. Journal of European Public Policy 31 (9): 2483–2508.
- Trottier, Daniel. 2012. Policing Social Media. Canadian Review of Sociology 49 (4): 411–425.
- Tucker, Sean. 2024. Tesla Pushes Leasing as Sales Decline. Kelley Blue Book, December 9. https://www.kbb.com/car-news/tesla-pushes-leasing-as-sales-decline/ [accessed January 28, 2025].
- Turow, Joseph, and Nick Couldry. 2018. Media as Data Extraction: Towards a New Map of a Transformed Communications Field. Journal of Communication 68 (2): 415–423.
- Turow, Joseph, Lee McGuigan, and Elena Maris. 2015. Making Data Mining a Natural Part of Life: Physical Retailing, Customer Surveillance and the 21st Century Social Imaginary. European Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (4–5): 464–478.
- Urbanik, Marta, Robby Roks, Michelle Storrod, and James Densley. 2020. Ethical and Methodological Issues in Gang Ethnography in the Digital Age: Lessons from Four Studies in and Emerging Field. In Gangs in the Era of Internet and Social Media, edited by Chris Melde and Frank Weerman, 21–41. The Hague, NL: Springer.
- Veblen, Thorstein. 1899 [1994]. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: Dover Publications.
- Verheggen, Frank, Fred Nieman, and Ruud Jonkers. 1998. Determinants of Patient Participation in Clinical Studies Requiring Informed Consent: Why Patients Enter a Clinical Trial. Patient Education and Counseling 35 (2): 111–125.
- Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs.