Online surveillance has been around for a long time. Before it was online, it was neighbours telling on neighbours – like the current North Korea state, the former East German Stasi and many many more.

It has become more widespread in societies that do not have governmental surveillance as the norm, instead the surveillance in the name of business/capitalism – check out Shoshana Zuboff‘s well written and explained, Surveillance Capitalism (available at the National Library).

“As long as there is a business case that can generate profits, let’s turn a blind eye to surveillance” – that’s how the likes of Facebook and their ilk, go about their business.

“Oh, it is only metadata, we are not reading your messages, listening to your conversations” – is what they will say – which is technically correct – but they are mining the metadata for their profit without nothing going to those whose metadata is being harvested is bad in itself.

I appreciate that lots of people don’t understand what’s bad about harvesting metadata. Let me give a simple example. Back in the day when we used to send letters by postal mail (sometimes referred to as snail mail), the letters were placed in envelops, stamped, destination address written, sometimes the sender’s details are on the envelop and mailed out.

The stuff on the envelop is called metadata. This is data about the data. It is the data that says that whatever data is in the envelop is of interest to the one (or two) parties listed on the envelop.

You can collect all of the envelops discarded in the garbage to then determine who/where/when the various communications are happening. You might now know what was communicated but you do have an inkling of the parties.

In the Before Times (the time before electronic communications), these types of surveillance were done by governments, private investigators etc. It was slow, tiresome, expensive.

Today, with electronic communications, it is fast, quick, automatable and relatively afforable. You also have the opportunity to listen-in, watch and do lots more.