National Geographic

THEY ARE WATCHING YOU 41of the billions more photographs and videos peo-ple keep to themselves. By 2020, one telecommu-nications company estimates, 6.1 billion peoplewill have phones with picture-taking capabilities.Meanwhile, in a single year an estimated 106 mil-lion new surveillance cameras are sold. More thanthree million ATMs around the planet stare backat their customers. Tens of thousands of camerasknown as automatic number plate recognition de-vices, or ANPRs, hover over roadways—to catchspeeding motorists or parking violators but also,in the case of the United Kingdom, to track thecomings and goings of suspected criminals. Theuntallied but growing number of people wearingbody cameras now includes not just police butalso hospital workers and others who aren’t lawenforcement officers. Proliferating as well arepersonal monitoring devices—dash cams, cyclisthelmet cameras to record collisions, doorbellsequipped with lenses to catch package thieves—that are fast becoming a part of many a city dwell-er’s everyday arsenal. Even less quantifiable, butfar more vexing, are the billions of images of un-suspecting citizens captured by facial-recognitiontechnology and stored in law enforcement andprivate-sector databases over which our controlis practically nonexistent.Those are merely the “watching” devices thatwe’re capable of seeing. Presently the skies arecluttered with drones—2.5 million of which werepurchased in 2016 by American hobbyists andbusinesses. That figure doesn’t include the fleetof unmanned aerial vehicles used by the U.S. gov-ernment not only to bomb terrorists in Yemen butalso to help stop illegal immigrants entering fromMexico, monitor hurricane flooding in Texas, andcatch cattle thieves in North Dakota. Nor does itinclude the many thousands of airborne spyingdevices employed by other countries—amongthem Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.We’re being watched from the heavens as well.More than 1,700 satellites monitor our planet.From a distance of about 300 miles, some of themcan discern a herd of buffalo or the stages of aforest fire. From outer space, a camera clicks anda detailed image of the block where we work canbe acquired by a total stranger.Simultaneously, on that very same block, wemay well be photographed at unsettlingly closerange perhaps dozens of times daily, from lenseswe may never see, our image stored in databas-es for purposes we may never learn. Our smart-phones, our Internet searches, and our socialmedia accounts are giving away our secrets. GusHosein, the executive director of Privacy Interna-tional, notes that “if the police wanted to knowwhat was in your head in the 1800s, they wouldhave to torture you. Now they can just find it outfrom your devices.”This is—to lift the title from another Britishfuturist, Aldous Huxley—our brave new world.That we can see it coming is cold comfort since,as Carnegie Mellon University professor of infor-mation technology Alessandro Acquisti says, “inthe cat-and-mouse game of privacy protection, thedata subject is always the weaker side of the game.”Simply submitting to the game is a dispiritingproposition. But to actively seek to protect one’sprivacy can be even more demoralizing. Universi-ty of Texas American studies professor RandolphLewis writes in his new book, Under Surveillance:Being Watched in Modern America, “Surveillanceis often exhausting to those who really feel its un-dertow: it overwhelms with its constant badgering,its omnipresent mysteries, its endless tabulationsof movements, purchases, potentialities.”The desire for privacy, Acquisti says, “is a uni-versal trait among humans, across cultures andacross time. You find evidence of it in ancientRome, ancient Greece, in the Bible, in the Quran.What’s worrisome is that if all of us at an individ-ual level suffer from the loss of privacy, societyas a whole may realize its value only after we’velost it for good.”Is a looming state of Orwellian bleakness al-ready a fait accompli? Or is there a more hopefuloutlook, one in which a world under watch inmany ways might be better off? Consider the 463infrared camera traps the World Wildlife Funduses in China to monitor the movements of thethreatened giant panda. Or the thermal imagingdevices that rangers deploy at night to detectpoachers in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Re-serve. Or the sound-activated underwater camera