Surveillance on Platforms or by Platforms? Conceptualising Agency in Ubiquitous Surveillance

Many scandals have made visible that digital platforms have developed into tools of surveillance for various actors. On the one hand government agencies engage in surveillance on platforms in order to meet government responsibilities (or what the agencies perceive as such). An example of this is the US' National Security Agencies with its Prism program. On the other hand private actors use platforms for their particular interest. Examples here range from the platform providers, to other private organizations and to the end users themselves. Platforms therefore contribute to the increasing ubiquity that signifies surveillance in the digital age. This ubiquity makes it increasingly difficult to answer questions of agency in surveillance. Who is to what extent responsible for the surveillance we experience if various actors, even we ourselves seem to participate in it? In reaction to the ubiquity of surveillance various theoretical concepts have been proposed, like the "surveillant assemblage" (Haggerty and Ericson 2000) or “sousveillance” (Mann 2004). However, these concepts seem not to enable us to draw the distinction between the object and the subject of surveillance but instead they blur this distinction. In this paper it is argued, that said distinction is necessary to preserve both the analytical as well as the normative value of the concept of surveillance. In order to account for the increased ubiquity of surveillance the paper proposes a concept that allows to distinguish various levels of engagement in surveillance and therefore types of agency. This concept is developed and illustrated by referring to the largest social media platform, Facebook. The paper gives a detailed overview on the variety of actors engaging in surveillance on Facebook and the type of their involvement. It therefore presents firstly empirical data on surveillance on one of the most influential digital platforms, while secondly proposing a theoretical concept to deal with a key feature of surveillance in the digital age.