Tag Archives: Surveillance

General Media Theory

Digital Surveillance: Body & Power

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Introduction:

Our phones are constantly surveilling us, although we often fail to notice it. In this era of digital technology, we have grown accustomed to our devices requesting access to our data, our location, and ultimately our private lives. We have become accustomed to saying “yes” to breaches of our privacy without considering the repercussions and what these companies plan to do with our data. This passive willingness has kept us unaware of the larger political and economic systems that are at play. As society has become more polarized and capitalist, it is essential to be aware of the dangers inherent in digital surveillance. Companies are actively collecting, commercializing, and selling intimate data without informing the users. Lindsay Balfour’s Surveillance, Biopower, and Unsettling Intimacies discusses the dangers of surveillance of women’s intimate needs in the overturning of Roe v Wade. Balfour’s work reminds us of the hysteria that occurred after the overturning and the fear of period tracking apps selling our data to the United States government. In this era of political control of people’s bodies, especially marginalized communities, it is crucial that we stay aware of these dangers. These concerns become even more prevalent with the newly introduced government-funded AI-driven surveillance system to help ICE profile and hunt down immigrants across social media. This military grade surveillance system is being used to perpetuate fear and discrimination. Balfour’s analysis of intimate data and ICE’s extreme monitoring practices demonstrates how surveillance functions as a tool of power that aims to control the body and society. 

Biopower & Intimate Data:

After the overturning of Roe v Wade, I remember feeling worried about my menstrual application and the data it held. Before these political implementations, I had been utilizing a US-based company, Flo, before switching to Clue, a UK-based company that explicitly claimed that it would protect user’s health information. Looking back, this choice was more significant than I realized. Balfour discusses that in 2021, Flo reached a settlement with the FTC (Federal Trade Commission)  after being accused of sharing intimate health data of over 100 million users to third-party companies. Although Flo still claims they never sold this data, and that this settlement was “save time”, they were accused again in 2025 for collecting data and utilizing it for advising. This example demonstrates how easily our most intimate bodily data can be packaged, commodified, and circulated without our consent. While it may seem harmless for advertisers to have access to this information, the stakes become higher when such data can be accessed by the government or law enforcement. 

Through Balfour’s discussion of biopower, it becomes evident that these methods of surveillance do not simply observe the body; they regulate it. Balfour references Michel Foucault’s theory on biopower from Biopower: Foucault and Beyond, which is defined as a form of political power that regulates bodies and population by collecting and surveilling, ultimately working towards making a society that serves the government’s interest. Balfour reminds us that through collecting reproductive data that tracks cycles, predicts pregnancies, and perhaps informs about complications or personal choices, these platforms lose their neutrality. They participate in a political system that wants to govern bodies at a biological level. Balfour argues that “Platforms are no longer things outside or adjacent to us, whether hand-held or screen mediated; instead they are now embedded, both literally and figuratively in our lives and bodies”(60). The intersection between these digital platforms and our bodies can be dangerous when we understand its political consequences. With the increasingly strict regulations surrounding abortion and gender affirming care, choices that were meant to be private are being monitored without our consent. This is an attempt by the political system to limit self expression and autonomy, having society adhere to their values or be punished for deviation. We can see how the monitoring of our personal information is being used against us, putting our bodies and livelihoods at risk.

State Surveillance & Social Control:

This era of surveillance is not limited to regulating our bodies; it’s being increasingly used to control the population and immigration. As reported by The Lever, the Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) has purchased a 5.7 million AI social media surveillance software that is designed to read over 8 billion social media posts a day. Although ICE claims that this software is meant to “detect threats,” there has been no public consent from social media users whose information is being run through this program. It becomes clear that the government is using digital surveillance to control and classify people as “dangerous” or “threatening” without proper investigation. This raises major concerns in this current polarized political climate, as many pro-Palestine activists have been targeted by immigration authorities after being doxxed (having their private information exposed). With the increase in anti-Latino immigration rhetoric, it is worrying how this technology will further perpetuate systems of violence. These surveillance methods work to silence political expression and place vulnerable communities at even more risk. This surveillance technology is extremely alarming, as there is a lot of secrecy surrounding it. Even after searching online, there was a surprising lack of articles on the topic. This lack of transparency demonstrates erasure of consent on digital platforms. Social Media companies that once promised to protect users’ privacy are easily allowing government access to their information without permission or warning. Serious matters such as immigration are being reduced to the qualifications of AI technology and “digital footprint”. With the rise of digital surveillance, it’s becoming clear how easily our autonomy is being stripped away, leaving our private information at risk. 

Conclusion:

As digital surveillance increases, it becomes more important than ever for us to be self-aware of our data and the breaches of our privacy. As mentioned by Foucault, systems of power use surveillance to control our bodies and population. These power structures want to silence our voices and limit our choices through surveillance and punishment. It’s crucial we acknowledge that these platforms that say they will protect our data are often taking hidden contracts that commodify our information, caring more about money than our safety. Although privacy issues around menstruation and immigration data occurred in the United States. These problems are not confined to only one country, as digital surveillance expands globally, and many countries are turning more conservative. This use of intimate data to control, silence, and discipline the masses is becoming normalized. It’s crucial as Media Studies students and users of the internet that we recognize the danger of surveillance. This topic is extremely important to us as media creators, as we are often using digital platforms to speak our minds. We must acknowledge that our art, our words, and our values may be surveilled and used against us. This is why we must take the time to analyze and consider the repercussions before passively saying “yes” to tracking or sharing data. We can only begin to resist these systems of oppression once we truly understand them and their consequences.

Works Cited: 

Balfour, Lindsay Anne. “Surveillance, Biopower, and Unsettling Intimacies in Reproductive Tracking Platforms.” TOPIA, vol. 48, 1 Mar. 2024, pp. 58–75, doi:10.3138/topia-2023-0025. 

Cisney, Vernon W., and Nicolae Morar. Biopower: Foucault and Beyond. The University of Chicago Press, 2016. Schwenk, Katya. “Ice Just Bought a Social Media Surveillance Bot.” The Lever, 21 Nov. 2025, www.levernews.com/ice-just-bought-a-social-media-surveillance-botice-just-bought-a-social-media-surveillance-bot/. Accessed 10 Dec. 2025.

Written by Aminata Chipembere

General Media Theory, Other

That’s Valid…?

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My grade twelve homeform teacher was one of the people who encouraged me the most to go to UBC. He went to Simon Fraser for BEd and once joked I reminded him of a younger version of himself — it was all the sweeter when he said I was “full of s—” when I asked what he’d meant in calling me facetious. We were his last class in his last year teaching, and he liked drawn out chats as much as he liked to talk over the entirety of a film’s run time, spare the long pauses with open faced palms and a big smiley “ah-ah-ahhh,” glancing at us in a darkened classroom to see if ‘we got it’ (imagine the sound of a seal eager to be fed).

He didn’t talk over Gattaca though. The 1996 sci-fi flick stars Jude Law, Ethan Hawke, and Uma Thrurman and is set in the near-future where eugenics is widespread, dividing society in perfected ‘valids’ and impure, naturally-conceived ‘invalids.’ Hawke plays an invalid, Vincient, who masquerades as the paralyzed — but valid — Olympic swimmer Jerome in a bid to go to space that would otherwise be impossible given the unconfirmed presence of heart defect. Every single morning, Vincient undergoes an extensive routine of meticulously hiding himself behind contacts and fingers printed in the shape of Jerome while scrubbing clean any bioindictors that would identify his true self.  That’s mad, man.

Anyway: this one’s for you, Joel.

The eugenics of Gattaca are multifaceted. Fertilization takes place in laboratory petri dishes as zygotes are screened and selected both for particular attributes like gender, complexion and intelligence and the absence of defects or inheritable diseases. The resulting effect is the proliferation of a caste system, powered by an invalid underclass resigned to menial, subservient social and economic positions. Genoism — discrimination of those due to their genetic profile — is technically prohibited but a principle practice in the hyper-corporate-capitalist future. Instantaneous and frequent DNA testing is everywhere and powered by a collective genetic registry, squashing any attempt for an invalid to circumnavigate their social roles.

Though (thankfully) our own society doesn’t practice eugenics, the concept of capitalist biometric surveillance is not foreign to us — no, not at all. Lindsay Anne Balfour authored an article which raises rightful suspicions toward Femtech: her term for platformized feminine health technology like menstruation and ovulation trackers on one’s smartphone (2024). Data from users is stored by these apps and have — and continue to be — sold to social media and advertising firms, becoming an implicit identifying category digitally for users. These data bases, though not collectivized or publicly accessible, constitute an analogous structural transposition of a genetic registry. Advertising-driven models of revenue for digital platforms commodifies user-sourced data, incentivizing and contextualizing the channels of information infrastructure toward a de facto confederated pool of identifying data. 

As media scholars, we should have no illusion that our advanced (and still rapidly growing) digital social spaces lack a reactive, considered legal framework that accurately represents their whole relationship to both the self and society. Though Balfour uses the example of the app Flo being charged in the US for misleading customers regarding data sales, personal data stored on these apps have few legal protections. FemTech rarely tracks data that warrants platforms being listed as a covered-entity under America’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. As such, these platforms have fewer restrictions on storing and selling data. She provides the example of a South Carolina bill designed to make abortion punishable by death — it’s not an unfounded question to the moral character of lawmakers so offended by access to healthcare in asking what end they’d go to in ‘bringing people to justice.’ What about tracked geospatial data of a user visiting a medical clinic? Beyond subpoenas, what if police proceed into the (disgustingly) unregulated territory of simply purchasing data from advertisers in search of a conviction?

In the face of such technology, users end up having their personal ‘self’ increasingly imprinted and fragmented across digital spheres. A person has the ready ability to use these information deposit-boxes as extensions of their mind, assisting in monitoring what they’d otherwise do themselves. Sherry Turkle has written extensively on this notion that people’s identities reflect separate but enmeshed characterizations of themself. (Weiss 2019). When biometrics identifiers are among those being tracked, this enmeshment becomes paradoxically intimate; user’s physical bodies are increasingly traced through apps as their data is liable to be shipped and shared with less-than-privy eyes. 

Okay, wait, let’s return to Gattaca. Again, we do not share the film’s fantasy of living in a genetically engineering civilization — the conversation regarding eugenics and biopolitics is its own can of worms. However, we can’t ignore its commentary on what advanced media technology has the potential to enable regarding how we interact with human identity. The genetic registry is of particular interest in this regard. It can be accessed and shared among any corporate entity to corroborate a DNA test against one another, returning a binary marker of the person before them as either ‘valid’ or ‘invalid’ — good or bad. In this action, they are robbed not only of any semblance of mobility, agency, or equality before their peers but of all of these virtues and rights we take for granted regarding the very act of self-conception. Vincent possesses every cognitive faculty which would let him go to space but is prohibited by an omnipresent registry that reduces his human potential to the delimitation of a collectivized knowledge base.

It’s best to proceed with my point in comparing the technology of Gattaca and Balfour’s concerns regarding FemTech. FemTech does not create or define a person as a living, breathing human. It does, however, draw increasingly sensitive categories around one’s digital self  — the way that our digital sphere conceives and represents the human. More important, however, is that this data becomes increasingly foreign to oneself and is, as evidenced through legal proceedings regarding such data, flowing further away from our explicit control. To think that current laws come close to matching the potential exploitative — or discriminative — features of digital technology made increasingly intricate year by year is both naive and explicitly wrong. Sci-Fi is one manner in which we speculate future outcomes of our current actions. In walking away from Gattaca, we must affirm a commitment to upholding the human behind the numbers, not the numbers themselves. 

References:

Balfour, Lindsay Ann. “Surveillance, Biopower, and Unsettling Intimacies in Reproductive Tracking Platforms.” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 48, 2024, pp. 58-75.

Weiss, Dennis M. “Seduced by the Machine Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, pp. 217-232. Canvas Materials.