By Jerameel Kevins Owuor Odhiambo
Surveillance has become an inescapable reality of our current daily existence. Every smartphone carried in a pocket, every camera mounted on a street corner, and every digital transaction completed online generates data that can be collected, analyzed, and stored indefinitely. According to recent estimates, there are over one billion surveillance cameras operating worldwide, with China alone accounting for more than half of this staggering figure. The average person living in a major city is captured on camera between 70 to 300 times per day, creating a comprehensive digital record of their movements and behaviors. This pervasive monitoring infrastructure has fundamentally transformed the relationship between individuals and both state and corporate entities. The technology that once promised convenience and security now threatens the very foundation of personal autonomy and democratic freedom. What emerges is a critical tension between the imperatives of safety and the fundamental human right to privacy.
The legal recognition of privacy as a fundamental right has evolved significantly over the past century, establishing important precedents that continue to shape contemporary debates. In the United States, the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) recognized a constitutional right to privacy, finding that various guarantees in the Bill of Rights create “penumbras” and “zones of privacy” that protect individual autonomy from governmental intrusion. This principle was further developed in Katz v. United States (1967), where the Court established that the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places, and introduced the reasonable expectation of privacy test that remains influential today.
The European Court of Human Rights has similarly affirmed privacy protections through Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees respect for private and family life. In the landmark case of S. and Marper v. United Kingdom (2008), the Court ruled that the indefinite retention of DNA profiles and cellular samples of individuals who had not been convicted of any offense violated their right to privacy. These judicial decisions established that privacy is not merely a preference but a fundamental human right deserving of robust legal protection. The courts recognized that without privacy, individuals cannot fully exercise their autonomy, dignity, and freedom of thought and expression. These foundations now face unprecedented challenges from technological capabilities that the framers of these protections could never have imagined.
The expansion of government surveillance programs in the name of national security has repeatedly collided with privacy rights, producing landmark legal battles and public controversies. The revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 exposed the massive scope of warrantless surveillance conducted by American intelligence agencies, including the bulk collection of telephone metadata from millions of citizens who were not suspected of any wrongdoing. In the subsequent litigation, the case of ACLU v. Clapper initially challenged this program, though it was ultimately rendered moot by legislative changes that nominally reformed the surveillance regime. The European response was more definitive, with the Court of Justice of the European Union striking down the Safe Harbor agreement in Schrems v. Data Protection Commissioner (2015), finding that U.S. surveillance practices did not provide adequate protection for the personal data of European citizens.
The court emphasized that legislation permitting public authorities to access personal data on a generalized basis, without any differentiation or limitation, exceeds the limits of what is strictly necessary in a democratic society. These cases illustrate the fundamental incompatibility between mass surveillance architectures and the privacy protections enshrined in constitutional democracies. The tension reveals a stark choice between security states that monitor all citizens as potential threats and free societies that presume innocence and protect individual liberty. The Snowden revelations permanently altered public discourse, demonstrating that the threat to privacy often comes not from theoretical possibilities but from actual governmental practices already in operation.
Corporate surveillance has emerged as an equally significant threat to privacy, operating through business models that commodify personal information and behavioral data. Tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have constructed vast data empires built on the systematic collection and analysis of user behavior, creating detailed profiles that predict and influence individual choices. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, revealed in 2018, demonstrated how personal data harvested from millions of Facebook users without consent could be weaponized for political manipulation during elections. In response to these growing threats, the European Union implemented the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, establishing the most comprehensive privacy protection framework in the world and granting individuals unprecedented control over their personal data.
The regulation’s extraterritorial reach has influenced privacy practices globally, forcing companies to reconsider their data collection practices or face substantial penalties. The case of Google LLC v. CNIL (2019) before the Court of Justice of the European Union addressed the scope of the “right to be forgotten,” balancing privacy rights against freedom of information and determining that delisting requirements need not apply globally but only within the EU. These developments reflect growing recognition that corporate surveillance capitalism poses fundamental challenges to human autonomy and dignity. The collection of intimate details about individuals’ lives, habits, preferences, and relationships creates unprecedented opportunities for manipulation, discrimination, and control that extend far beyond traditional concerns about governmental overreach.
Biometric surveillance technologies represent a particularly invasive evolution in monitoring capabilities, capturing immutable personal characteristics and enabling identification without consent or awareness. Facial recognition systems, now deployed by law enforcement agencies across dozens of countries, can identify individuals in real-time from camera footage, effectively eliminating anonymity in public spaces. In the United States, the case of Clearview AI has raised profound concerns after the company scraped billions of images from social media platforms without permission to create a facial recognition database used by law enforcement agencies. The technology’s accuracy problems disproportionately affect people of color, as demonstrated by numerous studies showing higher error rates in identifying individuals with darker skin tones, raising serious civil rights concerns.
The European Union has taken a more cautious approach, with the proposed AI Act including provisions that would ban certain uses of real-time biometric identification in public spaces by law enforcement, subject to limited exceptions for serious crimes. In Bridges v. South Wales Police (2020), the Court of Appeal of England and Wales found that the police force’s use of automated facial recognition technology violated privacy rights and equality laws due to insufficient legal safeguards and discriminatory impacts. These biometric systems fundamentally alter the nature of public space, transforming areas that were once anonymous into zones of permanent identification and tracking. The permanence of biometric data means that breaches or misuse can have lifelong consequences, as individuals cannot change their faces, fingerprints, or DNA the way they might change a password. The deployment of these technologies without adequate legal frameworks or democratic debate represents a dangerous precedent that normalizes pervasive surveillance as an acceptable feature of modern life.
The intersection of surveillance and marginalized communities reveals how monitoring technologies disproportionately burden those with the least power to resist. In the United States, predictive policing algorithms and surveillance systems are deployed most intensively in low-income communities and neighborhoods with predominantly minority populations, perpetuating patterns of discriminatory enforcement under a veneer of technological objectivity. The case of Floyd v. City of New York (2013) found that the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk practices violated the constitutional rights of minorities, demonstrating how surveillance-intensive policing strategies can systematically target vulnerable populations. Immigration enforcement has increasingly relied on surveillance technologies, including license plate readers, cell phone tracking, and data purchased from commercial brokers, to identify and apprehend undocumented individuals, creating climates of fear that deter community members from accessing essential services.
In the United Kingdom, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled in Privacy International v. Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (2016) that intelligence agencies had unlawfully obtained bulk communications data, though the case also highlighted the limited oversight mechanisms available to challenge surveillance practices. These patterns demonstrate that surveillance is not a neutral tool but one that reflects and amplifies existing social inequalities and power imbalances. Communities that are already subject to heightened scrutiny and control bear the greatest burden of intrusive monitoring while enjoying the fewest protections. The promise of surveillance as a means to create safer communities rings hollow when the safety of some is purchased through the systematic targeting and oppression of others.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the deployment of surveillance technologies, with contact tracing apps, temperature screening, and movement tracking implemented globally, often with limited transparency or accountability. Countries like China, South Korea, and Israel rapidly implemented comprehensive digital surveillance systems to monitor infections and enforce quarantines, raising questions about whether emergency measures would become permanent features of governance. The European Data Protection Board issued guidance emphasizing that pandemic responses must respect fundamental rights and that any data processing must be necessary, proportionate, limited in time, and subject to appropriate safeguards.
In contrast, some jurisdictions implemented surveillance measures with few constraints, creating infrastructure that could easily be repurposed for other forms of social control once the immediate health crisis subsided. The case of Gaughran v. United Kingdom (2020) at the European Court of Human Rights, though not directly related to the pandemic, nonetheless reinforced principles about the retention of personal data, ruling that the blanket and indiscriminate retention of biometric data violated privacy rights. These pandemic surveillance programs demonstrated how easily extraordinary measures can be normalized and how crisis situations provide opportunities to expand monitoring capabilities without meaningful debate. The ease with which populations accepted intrusive surveillance in the name of public health suggests a troubling willingness to trade fundamental rights for perceived security. The critical question is whether democratic societies can maintain meaningful privacy protections in an era of perpetual emergency, where each new crisis provides justification for ever-expanding surveillance powers.
The future of privacy rights depends on whether democratic societies can reclaim control over surveillance technologies and establish meaningful constraints on both governmental and corporate monitoring. The emerging resistance to surveillance capitalism, evidenced by increased regulatory action in Europe, privacy-focused product design, and growing public awareness, suggests that the trajectory toward total surveillance is not inevitable. Legal frameworks like the GDPR, California Consumer Privacy Act, and similar legislation represent important steps toward recognizing data rights as fundamental to human dignity and autonomy in the digital age. Courts continue to play a crucial role in articulating the boundaries of acceptable surveillance, as demonstrated by the Supreme Court’s decision in Carpenter v. United States (2018), which held that accessing historical cell phone location data constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment, requiring a warrant.
However, technological capabilities continue to outpace legal protections, and the political will to constrain surveillance remains inconsistent across jurisdictions. The choice before contemporary societies is stark: accept a future of pervasive monitoring where privacy becomes a luxury available only to the wealthy and powerful, or reimagine the relationship between technology, governance, and individual rights to preserve the conditions necessary for human flourishing. The right to privacy is not merely about hiding information; it is about preserving the space for autonomy, dissent, creativity, and the development of self that makes democracy possible and human life meaningful. Only by recognizing surveillance as a fundamental threat to these values can we hope to build a future where technology serves human freedom rather than constraining it.
The writer is a legal researcher and writer
Aoma Keziah