Measuring Perceptions of and Reactions to Dataveillance– Findings from a Mixed-Methods Research Project

In highly digitized societies, people use digital services for various everyday-life purposes. By doing so, they generate vast amounts of digital traces, which are collected, aggregated, and processed by public and private actors in automated, continuous, and unspecific ways. We understand this dataveillance as an example of governance by algorithms (Latzer & Just, 2020). When this dataveillance becomes salient to internet users, they can feel watched or listened to online. Such a heightened sense of dataveillance can lead to internet users self-inhibiting their legitimate or socially desirable online information or communication behaviors, such as seeking for information or voicing their opinion. Such self-inhibition is known as a chilling effect of dataveillance (Büchi et al., 2022) and can be detrimental from a democracy perspective. Therefore, an empirical assessment of the chilling effects of dataveillance is desired. Our project contributes to this in two ways. First, it explores citizen perceptions of dataveillance qualitatively through semi-structured interviews. Our findings show that participants perceived governments as actors involved in dataveillance. Whether this perception resulted in a change in their digital communication behavior heavily depended on their trust in these actors. Second, our project investigates the chilling effects of dataveillance with a quantitative longitudinal field experiment of Swiss internet users. Our findings will show whether a heightened sense of dataveillance over time leads to self-inhibition on an individual level. This study sheds light on the so far under-researched chilling effects of dataveillance and lays the base for the development of appropriate governance measures.