The rise of "luxury surveillance"

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/10/amazon-tracking-devices-surveillance-state/671772/

Sharing this piece in which Chris Gilliard calls attention to "luxury surveillance”, defined as surveillance that people pay for because they value the benefits it brings. It offers a different entrypoint for thinking about surveillance by highlighting how it's not always imposed nonconsensually through dark UX or coercion.

While Gilliard focuses on Amazon, my favorite example is TSA PreCheck. I remember considering signing up when I got access to it for free through a credit card back in 2016. The program seemed too good to be true so I searched around and came across an article—I'm pretty sure it was this blog post by the ACLU—that explained how an ever-increasing allowlist eventually becomes a de facto blocklist by rendering certain categories of people more suspicious through their ineligibility for PreCheck. For example, if Muslim, Black, or immigrant applications are systematically less likely to be approved, PreCheck would constitute an example of what Browne calls "racializing surveillance". This is especially true given how the TSA "reif[ies] boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines" (p. 16) and given its aspirations to expand PreCheck widely at the time.

In protest, I have refused to sign up for PreCheck since then. However, I still pay for other luxury surveillance products. For example, I still have that credit card...