Surveillance: a (potential) threat to political participation?

Abstract

Despite efforts of several authors, surveillance is nowadays yet sparsely understood, although surveillance has increasing impacts in our lives. The purpose of this paper is to point out, from a theoretical point of view, the threats that surveillance presents to political participation (and by consequence, to democracy) in digital societies. Current researches present the threats of surveillance to democracy focusing mainly in democracy-privacy trade-offs. Such debate, on the one hand, circumscribes the issue to a great extent to choosing the rulers and the kind of political regime, which does not allow a broader analysis of citizen participation in all spheres of public life in their daily life. On the other hand, the current debates seem put a little aside from the main issue: it is not the loss of privacy, but the loss of autonomy that challenges participation (and by consequence, democracy); although nowadays the threats to autonomy proceed mainly from the loss of privacy.