On surveyance
surveillance (n.) 1802, from French surveillance “oversight, supervision, a watch,” noun of action from surveiller “oversee, watch” (17c.), from sur- “over” (see sur- (1)) + veiller “to watch,” from Latin vigilare, from vigil “watchful” (from PIE root *weg- “to be strong, be lively”). Seemingly a word that came to English from the Terror in France (“surveillance committees” were formed in every French municipality in March 1793 by order of the Convention to monitor the actions and movements of suspect persons, outsiders, and dissidents).
surveyance (n.) from survey (v.) c. 1400, “to consider, contemplate,” from Anglo-French surveier, Old French sorveoir “look (down) at, look upon, notice; guard, watch,” from Medieval Latin supervidere “oversee, inspect,” from Latin super “over” (see super-) + videre “to see” (from PIE root *weid- “to see”). Meaning “examine the condition of” is from mid-15c. That of “to take linear measurements of a tract of ground” is recorded from 1540s. Related: Surveyed; surveying; surveyance (late 14c.).
Systems involved in Footfall analysis, such as those tracking smartphones through probe-requests, present themselves as a seemingly innocuous activity of counting pedestrians in a shopping street. Their privacy statements will mention that no private data is being collected, personal identifyers are pseudomymized, opting-out is always an option, and so on. ( https://privacy.agrealestate.eu/en/policy/privacy ). One of the two companies hired by AG real estate to do Footfall analysis, Fidzup, has been first convicted in France for missuse of personal data ( https://www.cnil.fr/fr/mots-cles/mise-en-demeure ), while the other one, PFM Footfall, has invested in ways to comply with the european GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
Retail industry professionals will always be able to hide behind GDPR-compliant consent requests and notices, because it is true that they and their friends in the advertisement industry are not interested in the strictly legal-individual properties of a body crossing a shopping area. The real face of surveyance capitalism looks much more like an online survey on census and the clumsy counting of responses, than the spying on an individual to find evidence to fuel the repressive machine of a state.
Sure, advertising also targets personal data, but for the sole interest to combine and correlate properties that can drive sales and profits. Advertising is interested in properties and their combinations.. “incel”, “depressive”, “compulsive consumer”, “cancer survivor”. Names and surnames are irrelevant from this point of view. They are necessary, though, to aggregate properties to a single bearer, and to group bearers according to the network of their relations. Of course this practice overlaps with the work of repressive states identifying and spying on protestors, for the reason that they will pay the very same parties to access this information (Facebook, Google, etc.) and they will share tools to track, assess, predict. But even though Facebook will provide the data to maintain good relations with all these states that are in exchange very kind regarding tax-returns and the likes, Facebook is not organized around surveillance. The business model of platforms is centered on surveyance, on the data extraction to be sold to advertisers, not on the gathering of data for intellicence services.
Nevertheless what we see unfolding, especially in the city, is something that could give as a side effect the possibility to observe and repress inhabitants as political actors. And it should be definitely be fought for this reason, too. But it would be a misunderstanding of the switch to the generalized quantification and measurement of everything, to oppose it solely on those grounds. There will always be ‘ethical’ committees, data protection officers and GDPR experts that will make sure that ‘privacy-by-design’ guidelines are followed and privacy statements are designed to be ignored. Independently from how well-meaning are these attempts, this won’t stop the processes at work: the alignment between cloud-based networked computation, platformized socialization, the advertising-profiling economy, and the real-estate-driven shaping of the city.
So even though Footfall is something that looks much more like “taking the linear measurements of a tract of ground” than “monitoring the actions and movements of suspect persons, outsiders, and dissidents”, the two practices and the parties involved in them share systems and gazes on the city. It is the city as an arena of primarily commercial interest, socialization as consumption opportunities, crowds as threats to control or populations to fine-tune, passerbys as moving targets for ads. Searching for ways to address these issues, we stumble upon the limitations of a critique that relies on notions of privacy as an individual concern. The matter is not individual. It concerns the interest of publics as intersecting collective bodies with different urgencies and identities, of cities as manifold forms of living and relating to each other. This needs vocabularies, methods, imaginaries and charms that enable collective modes of meddling with surveyance, of looking back.