Résumés
Abstract
Most previous studies on online surveillance have been conducted in long-time liberal democracies with limited experiences of explicit and intrusive state surveillance. This article explores the role of the historical legacy of totalitarianism or authoritarianism, embodied in generational experiences, in the formation of imaginaries of, and attitudes toward, contemporary state and corporate surveillance. We propose a theoretical hypothesis of the “surveillance survival paradox”: firsthand experiences of the past (totalitarian/authoritarian) surveillance regime do not lead to a greater fear or criticism of the contemporary regime; rather, it is the opposite. The article presents results from an original mixed-method study combining a quantitative online survey (N=3,221) with focus group and individual interviews (seventy-one participants) conducted among two generations (born in 1946–1953 and 1988–1995) in three European countries with different historical surveillance regimes (Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden). The quantitative analysis reveals significant cross-cultural differences in personal and mediated experiences of surveillance. Inter-generational differences in attitudes toward contemporary surveillance were surprisingly similar across the countries, with the older groups in all countries demonstrating higher tolerance toward online state surveillance, and the younger groups reporting higher acceptance for corporate dataveillance. The qualitative analysis reveals that perceptions of the past surveillance regime as more direct and dangerous overshadow sensitivities toward more abstract and covert risks related to the extended state and corporate surveillance in the contemporary datafied world. The results led us to formulate the “surveillance survival paradox” as a generation-specific, and probably also country- or regime-specific, phenomenon.
Keywords:
- Authoritarianism,
- Estonia,
- Portugal,
- Sweden,
- corporate surveillance,
- state online surveillance,
- totalitarianism,
- surveillance attitudes,
- digital privacy
Parties annexes
Bibliography
- Andrejevic, Mark, and Kelly Gates. 2014. Big Data Surveillance. Surveillance & Society 12 (2): 185–196.
- Astapova, Anastasiya. 2017. In Search for Truth: Surveillance Rumors and Vernacular Panopticon in Belarus. Journal of American Folklore 130 (517): 276–304.
- Bacelar de Gouveia, Jorge. 2021. CyberLaw and CyberSecurity. Revista Jurídica Portucalense 29: 59–77.
- Barnes, Susan B. 2006. A Privacy Paradox: Social Networking in the United States. First Monday 11 (9). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1394
- Bermejo, Fernando. 2009. Audience Manufacture in Historical Perspective: From Broadcasting to Google. New Media & Society 11 (1-2): 133–154.
- Bjereld, Ulf, and Henrik Oscarsson. 2009. Folket och FRA. In Svensk höst, edited by Sören Holmberg and Lennart Weibull, 293–298. Göteborg: SOM-institutet.
- Boersma, Kees, Rosamunde Van Brakel, Chiara Fonio, and Pieter Wagenaar. 2014. Introduction: Histories of State Surveillance in Europe and Beyond. In Histories of State Surveillance in Europe and Beyond, edited by Kees Boersma, Rosamunde Van Brakel, Chiara Fonio, and Pieter Wagenaar, 1–14. New York: Routledge.
- Bolin, Göran. 2011. Value and the Media: Cultural Production and Consumption in Digital Markets. Farnham: Ashgate.
- Bolin, Göran. 2016. Media Generations: Experience, Identity and Mediatised Social Change. London and New York: Routledge.
- Bolin, Göran. 2018. Media Use and the Extended Commodification of the Lifeworld. In Technologies of Labour and the Politics of Contradiction, edited by Paško Bilić, Jaka Primorac and Bjarki Valtýsson, 235–252. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Bolin, Göran, and Anne Jerslev. 2018. Surveillance Through Media, by Media, in Media. Northern Lights 16 (1): 3–21.
- Bolin, Göran, Veronika Kalmus and Rita Figueiras. 2023. Conducting Online Focus Group Interviews with Two Generations: Methodological Experiences and Reflections from the Pandemic Context. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 22: 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069231182029
- Bourdieu, Pierre. 1972/1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. 1980/1992. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Choi, Hanbyul, Jonghwa Park, and Yoonhyuk Jung. 2018. The Role of Privacy Fatigue in Online Privacy Behavior. Computers in Human Behavior 81: 42–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.12.001
- Clarke, Roger A. 1988. Information Technology and Dataveillance. Communications of the ACM 31 (5): 498–512.
- Clavell, Gemma G., and Pablo Ouziel. 2014. Spain’s documento nacional de identidad: An e-ID for the Twenty-first Century with a Controversial Past. In Histories of State Surveillance in Europe and Beyond, edited by Kees Boersma, Rosamunde Van Brakel, Chiara Fonio, and Pieter Wagenaar, 135–149. New York: Routledge.
- CNPD/Comissão Nacional de Proteção de Dados. 2022. Available at: https://www.cnpd.pt/comunicacao-publica/noticias/cnpd-ordena-eliminacao-dos-dados-das-comunicacoes-conservados-ao-abrigo-de-norma-declarada-inconstitucional/ [accessed 13 August 2022].
- Colombo, Fausto, and Leopoldina Fortunati. Eds. 2011. Broadband Society and Generational Changes. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
- Degli Esposito, Sara. 2014. When Big Data meets Dataveillance: The Hidden Side of Analytics. Surveillance & Society 12 (29): 209–225.
- Dencik, Lina, and Jonathan Cable. 2017. The Advent of Surveillance Realism. International Journal of Communication 11: 763–781.
- Edmunds, June, and Bryan S. Turner. 2002. Generations, Culture and Society. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press.
- Figueiras, Rita, Göran Bolin and Veronika Kalmus. 2024. Toward a Datafied Mindset: Conceptualizing Digital Dynamics and Analogue Resilience. Social Media + Society 10 (2): 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1177/205630512412543
- Fonio, Chiara, and Stefano Agnoletto. 2013. Surveillance Repression and the Welfare State: Aspects of Continuity and Discontinuity in Post-Fascist Italy. Surveillance & Society 11 (1/2): 74–86.
- Fuchs, Christian, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund and Marisol Sandoval. 2011. Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media. New York: Routledge.
- Furini, Marco, and Valentina Tamanini. 2015. Location Privacy and Public Metadata in Social Media Platforms: Attitudes, Behaviors and Opinions. Multimedia Tools and Applications 74 (21): 9795–9825.
- Gandy, Oscar. 1993. The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information. Boulder: Westview.
- Gates, Kelly. 2011. Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance. New York: New York UP.
- Giroux, Henry. 2015. Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State. Cultural Studies 29 (2): 108–140.
- Grass, Marianne L. 2004. The Legal Regulation of CCTV in Europe. Surveillance & Society 2 (2/3): 216–229.
- Gunnartz, Kristoffer. 2006. Välkommen till övervakningssamhället. Stockholm: Bokförlaget DN.
- Haggerty, Kevin D., and Richard V. Ericson. 2000. The Surveillant Assemblage. British Journal of Sociology 51 (4): 605–622.
- Haggerty, Kevin D., and Richard V. Ericson. 2006. The new politics of surveillance. In: The new politics of surveillance and visibility, edited by K. D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, 3–25. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
- Hargittai, Esther, and Alice Marwick. 2016. “What can I Really Do?” Explaining the Privacy Paradox with Online Apathy. International Journal of Communication 10: 3737–3757. https://doi.org/10.5167/UZH-148157
- Helm, Paula, and Sandra Seubert. 2020. Normative Paradoxes of Privacy: Literacy and Choice in Platform Societies. Surveillance & Society 18 (2): 185–198.
- Hurrelmann, Klaus, and Ullrich Bauer. 2018. Socialisation During the Life Course. Milton Park: Routledge.
- Inglehart, Ronald, and Christian Welzel. 2005. Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Introna, Lucas, and David Wood. 2004. Picturing Algorithmic Surveillance: The Politics of Facial Recognition Systems. Surveillance & Society 2 (2–3): 177–198.
- Jansson, André. 2012. Perceptions of Surveillance: Reflexivity and Trust in a Mediatized World (the case of Sweden). European Journal of Communication 27 (4): 410–427.
- Jennings, M. Kent, and Richard G. Niemi. 1981. Generations and Politics: A Panel Study of Young Adults and Their Parents. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Kalmus, Veronika. 2020. The Structuring Role of Generations in a Transforming Society: Reflections upon the Estonian Case within the Paradigms of Social Morphogenesis and Social Acceleration. In: Researching Estonian Transformation: Morphogenetic Reflections, edited by Veronika Kalmus, Marju Lauristin, Signe Opermann, and Triin Vihalemm, 293−325. Tartu: University of Tartu Press.
- Kalmus, Veronika, Göran Bolin and Rita Figueiras. 2024. Who is Afraid of Dataveillance? Attitudes towards Online Surveillance in a Cross-Cultural and Generational Perspective. New Media & Society 26 (9): 5291–5313. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221134493
- Kasekamp, Andres. 2010. A History of the Baltic States. Hampshire: Palgrave McMillan.
- Kennedy, Helen, Dag Elgesem and Christina Miguel. 2015. On Fairness: User Perspectives on Social Media Data Mining. Convergence 21 (4): 1–19.
- Kesan Jay P., Carol M. Hayes, and Masooda N. Bashir. 2016. A Comprehensive Empirical Study of Data Privacy Trust and Consumer Autonomy. Indiana Law Journal 91 (2): 267–352.
- Kosterich, Allie, and Philip M. Napoli. 2016. Reconfiguring the Audience Commodity: The Institutionalization of Social TV Analytics as Market Information Regime. Television & New Media 17 (3): 254–271.
- Leckner, Sara. 2018. Sceptics and Supporters of Corporate Use of Behavioural Data: A Study of Attitudes Towards Informational Privacy and Internet Surveillance in Sweden. Northern Lights 16 (1): 113–132.
- Levina, Marina. 2017. Under Lenin’s Watchful Eye: Growing Up in the Former Soviet Union. Surveillance & Society 15 (3/4): 529–534.
- Lutz, Christoph, Christian Pieter Hoffmann and Gulia Ranzini. 2020. Data Capitalism and the User: An Exploration of Privacy Cynicism in Germany. New Media & Society 22 (7): 1168–1187.
- Lyon, David. 1994. The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Lyon, David. 2001. Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Buckingham: Open University Press.
- Lyon, David. 2007. Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Cambridge: Polity.
- Lyon, David. 2014. Situating Surveillance: History, Technology, Culture. In Histories of State Surveillance in Europe and Beyond, edited by Kees Boersma, Rosamunde Van Brakel, Chiara Fonio and Pieter Wagenaar, 32–46. New York: Routledge.
- Lyon, David. 2015. Surveillance after Snowden. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press.
- Machado, Helena, and Catarina Frois. 2014. Aspiring to Modernization: Historical Evolution and Current Trends of State Surveillance in Portugal. In Histories of State Surveillance in Europe and Beyond, edited by Kees Boersma, Rosamunde Van Brakel, Chiara Fonio and Pieter Wagenaar, 65–78. New York: Routledge.
- Mannheim, Karl. 1928/1952. The Problem of Generations. Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge, 276–320. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
- Männiste, Maris. 2022. Big Data Imaginaries of Data Pioneers: Changed Data Relations and Challenges to Agency. Tartu: University of Tartu.
- Marx, Gary T. 2002. What’s New About the “New Surveillance”? Classifying for Change and Continuity. Surveillance & Society 1 (1): 9–29.
- Mathieu, David, and Jannie Hartley-Møller. (2021). Low on Trust, High on Use: Datafied Media Trust and Everyday Life. Big Data & Society 8 (2): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211059480
- Mejias, Ulises A., and Nick Couldry. 2019. Datafication. Internet Policy Review 8 (4): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1428
- Nagy, Veronika. 2017. How to Silence the Lambs? – Constructing Authoritarian Governance in Post-transitional Hungary. Surveillance & Society 15 (3/4): 447–455.
- Neundorf, Anja, and Grigory Pop-Eleches. 2020. Dictators and Their Subjects: Authoritarian Attitudinal Effects and Legacies. Comparative Political Studies, 53(12), 1839–1860. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414020926203
- Norris, Clive, Mike McCahill, and David Wood. 2003. The Growth of CCTV: A Global Perspective on the International Diffusion of Video Surveillance in Publicly Accessible Space. Surveillance & Society 1 (2): 110−135.
- Obar, Jonathan A., and Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch. 2020. The Biggest Lie on the Internet: Ignoring the Privacy Policies and Terms of Service Policies of Social Networking Services. Information, Communication & Society 23 (1): 128−147.
- Patton, Michael. 1990. Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
- Pettitt, Tom. 2013. The Privacy Paranthesis: Gutenberg, Homo Clausus and the Networked Self. Paper presented to the MiT8 conference, May 2013, Boston USA.
- Pimentel, Irene Flunser. 2001. História das Organizações Femininas do Estado Novo. O Estado Novo e as Mulheres. Lisboa: Temas e Debates.
- Pimentel, Irene Flunser. 2007. A História da PIDE. Lisboa: Temas e Debates.
- Priks, Mikael. 2015. The Effects of Surveillance Cameras on Crime: Evidence from the Stockholm Subway. The Economic Journal 125: 289−305.
- Roes, Friso, Johan Van Someren, Miek Wijnberg, Kees Boersma, and Pieter Wagenaar. 2014. Policy Windows for Surveillance: The Phased Introduction of the Identification Card in the Netherlands Since the Early Twentieth Century. In Histories of State Surveillance in Europe and Beyond, edited by Kees Boersma, Rosamunde Van Brakel, Chiara Fonio, and Pieter Wagenaar, 150–169. New York: Routledge.
- Sarakakis, Katharine, and Lisa Winter. 2017. Social Media Users’ Legal Consciousness About Privacy. Social Media + Society 3 (1): 1−14.
- Schwartz, Shalom H. 1990. Individualism–Collectivism: Critique and Proposed Refinements. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 21 (2): 139−157.
- Scott, James C. 1999. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- Sigel, Roberta S. Ed. 1989. Political Learning in Adulthood: A Sourcebook of Theory and Research. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
- Svenonius, Ola, and Fredrika Björklund. 2018a. Explaining Attitudes to Secret Surveillance in Post-Communist Societies. East European Politics 34 (2): 123–151.
- Svenonius, Ola, and Fredrika Björklund. 2018b. Surveillance from a Post-Communist Perspective. Surveillance & Society 16 (3): 269–276.
- Sztompka, Piotr. 2000. Cultural Trauma: The Other Face of Social Change. European Journal of Social Theory 3 (4): 449–466.
- Taylor, Charles. 2002. Modern Social Imaginaries. Public Culture 14 (1): 91–124.
- Trepte, Sabine, Leonard Reinecke, Nicole B. Ellison, Oliver Quiring, Mike Z. Yao, and Marc Ziegele. 2017. A Cross-cultural Perspective on the Privacy Calculus. Social Media + Society 1: 1–13.
- Trottier, Daniel. 2012. Social Media as Surveillance: Rethinking Visibility in a Converging World. Farnham: Ashgate.
- Trottier, Daniel, and David Lyon. 2012. Key Features of Social Media Surveillance. In Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media, edited by Christian Fuchs, Kees Broersma, Anders Albrechtslund and Marisol Sandoval, 89–105. London: Routledge.
- Turow, Joseph, Michael Hennessy, and Nora Draper. 2015. The Tradeoff Fallacy: How Marketers are Misrepresenting American Consumers and Opening Them up to Exploitation. Philadelphia: Annenberg School of Communication.
- van Dijck, José. 2014. Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance: Big Data Between Scientific Paradigm and Ideology. Surveillance & Society 12 (2): 197−208.
- van Dijck José, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal. 2018. The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Weiner, Amir, and Aigi Rahi-Tamm. 2012. Getting to Know You: The Soviet Surveillance System, 1939–57. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13 (1): 5−45.
- West, Sarah Myers. 2019. Data Capitalism: Redefining the Logics of Surveillance and Privacy. Business & Society 58 (1), 20–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/0007650317718185
- Wulf, Meike. 2016. Shadowlands: Memory and History in Post-Soviet Estonia. New York, Oxford: Berghahn.
- Zajko, Mike. 2023. Automated Government Benefits and Welfare Surveillance. Surveillance & Society 21 (3): 246−258.
- Zuboff, Shoshana. 2015. Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization. Journal of Information Technology 30 (1): 75−89.

