Looking Beyond Eyes: What We Lose When Technology Watches Us

Rahul Ramya

16.09.2025

When you open Google Maps to find the quickest way to the market, you might feel grateful for the convenience. Yet in that moment, your phone is not just helping you—it is also quietly recording where you are, where you came from, and how long you stay. What feels like a service is actually surveillance. In 2018, Google received fewer than 1,000 “geofence warrants” from U.S. police asking for data on everyone in a certain location. By 2020, the number had exploded to over 11,000 (Wired, 2020). Innocent bystanders walking near a protest or crime scene suddenly found their movements stored in criminal investigations. The shift is stark: the tool that helps us navigate the city is also what governments use to navigate our freedoms.

This isn’t just a story about the United States. In India, millions of people live with Aadhaar numbers linked to SIM cards, bank accounts, and even ration systems. For gig workers on delivery apps, GPS never sleeps. Rani, a delivery worker in Delhi, recalls how the app deducted her rating because she stopped briefly for a cup of chai. The system flagged her as “idle,” reducing her chance of future work. She said, “I wasn’t lazy, I was just human.” Yet in this new world, being human is almost a liability. A survey by Fairwork India in 2022 found that 83% of Indian gig workers reported working more than 10 hours a day under constant algorithmic surveillance (Fairwork India Report, 2022).

Companies like Google frame these tools as helpful. In 2015, it introduced Your Timeline, which allows people to see where they have been on a neat visual map. Many found it amusing or useful. But behind the glossy interface, the real purpose is clear: users were nudged to add photos, comments, and corrections, effectively training Google’s surveillance engine for free. In Brazil, people later discovered how location data tied to WhatsApp forwards was used to flood neighborhoods with political disinformation ahead of Jair Bolsonaro’s election victory in 2018. As The Guardian reported, business groups secretly financed mass WhatsApp campaigns that targeted voters by geography and demographics (The Guardian, 2018). One resident of São Paulo admitted: “It felt like they knew when I came home, what street I walked, and they used that to scare me into supporting them.”

The same pattern repeats globally. In China, the Social Credit System is perhaps the most visible symbol of surveillance politics. By 2019, it covered over a billion people. Its reach is not symbolic—it is literal. That year alone, 2.5 million citizens were blocked from flights and 90,000 from high-speed rail because of low credit scores, often linked to unpaid debts or “untrustworthy behavior” (BBC, 2019). Courts publicly named 300,000 people as “untrustworthy.” The lesson is clear: once surveillance is tied to identity, freedom itself becomes conditional.

Even where democratic safeguards exist, surveillance still gnaws at freedoms. In Hong Kong, during the 2019 protests, young demonstrators described the fear of carrying smartphones, knowing police could trace their locations. One student confessed she stayed home, not because she disagreed with the cause, but because “I did not want my face to be linked to my phone forever” (Reuters, 2019). Surveillance didn’t have to jail her—it silenced her before she even spoke.

In India, the chilling effect has been just as visible. During the farmers’ movement (2020–21), the government used Twitter and telecom companies to block protest hashtags and suspend accounts critical of farm laws (BBC, 2021). The anti-CAA protests (2019–20) saw police using CCTV and facial recognition software in Delhi to identify demonstrators (Indian Express, 2020). Protesters reported that fear of being recorded kept many away from marches. This shows how surveillance shrinks not just private space but also public space—the ground on which democracy stands. Hannah Arendt warned that the health of democracy depends not only on voting but on public action and debate. When surveillance makes people withdraw into silence, it corrodes the very “space of appearance” where free citizens meet as equals.

Meanwhile, the money flowing from surveillance is enormous. The global market for location-based advertising was worth $111 billion in 2023 and is projected to nearly triple to $296 billion by 2030 (Statista, 2024). In India alone, it is expected to leap from $2.8 billion in 2023 to $10.9 billion by 2030 (IMARC Group, 2024). For tech companies, our daily movements are not private—they are profit streams. The more data extracted, the more precisely ads, nudges, and even political messages can be targeted.

This brings us to the corporate–government handshake. In the United States, under Donald Trump, law enforcement agencies leaned heavily on Google’s location data and Palantir’s predictive policing tools. In India, Narendra Modi’s government welcomed huge investments by Facebook and Google in Jio Platforms, cementing a nexus between political power and corporate data giants (Reuters, 2020). In China, the Communist Party directly integrates Alibaba and Tencent data into governance systems. Across these cases, the pattern is the same: surveillance capitalism and political authority feed each other, building an infrastructure of control that is hard to resist.

What does this mean for democracy? It means free speech is reshaped when political campaigns use Google Ads to geofence voters near polling stations. It means the right to assemble is eroded when geofence warrants track everyone in a protest zone. It means public debate is tilted when misinformation finds its way more quickly to the people most likely to believe it, guided by location and behavioral data. Citizens are not just persuaded—they are engineered.

The human cost is not only about privacy but about dignity. Rani’s pause for tea, the São Paulo resident’s manipulated fear, the Hong Kong student’s silent absence, the Indian farmer silenced online—all show how surveillance convenience turns into surveillance deprivation. We lose not only our right to choose freely but also the basic respect of being treated as more than a data point.

Technology cannot be abolished, and indeed it brings genuine benefits. But if left unchecked, it transforms into a system where freedom itself feels like a service we must subscribe to—if we can afford it. The task before us is not to reject technology but to reclaim it: through strong laws like the EU’s GDPR and India’s new Digital Personal Data Protection Act, through political debate that refuses digital resignation, and through daily acts of civic resistance—from unions of gig workers demanding transparency to citizens supporting local, non-surveilled alternatives.

As philosophers from Aristotle to Amartya Sen remind us, freedom is not only about survival but about dignity, reflection, and agency. When our choices are silently nudged by systems we cannot see, our democracy weakens long before our vote is taken away. Looking beyond eyes, we must ask: do we want tools that serve us, or systems that watch us until we forget what it means to be free?

A Roadmap to Reclaiming Freedom in the Age of Surveillance

Karl Polanyi once described the “double movement”: as markets expand and disembed themselves from society, counter-movements arise to protect human dignity and community. Surveillance capitalism is today’s runaway market, commodifying our movements and voices. The resistance must be today’s counter-movement. Yet, as Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue in The Narrow Corridor, the struggle is like a “Red Queen race”: citizens and states must keep running just to stay in place, for technology and power structures evolve constantly. Reclaiming freedom, therefore, demands not a one-time fix but continuous vigilance.

1. Personal: Everyday Resistance

Digital literacy as self-defense: In 2021, students in Hyderabad taught auto drivers to use Signal and DuckDuckGo instead of WhatsApp and Google Maps. Even small choices reduce exposure.
Owning your data trail: Ola and Uber drivers in Delhi used tools to expose hidden fare cuts, forming unions for fairness (The Wire, 2022).
Reclaiming attention: Parents in India turning off YouTube autoplay to protect children show resistance begins at home.

2. Civic: Building Collective Alternatives

Digital unions: IFAT’s strikes forced Swiggy to revise unsafe delivery targets.
Community apps: Kerala’s Kudumbashree built a women-run e-commerce alternative, proving that cooperative technology is possible (Frontline, 2023).

3. Political: Demanding Accountability

Defiance under surveillance: Farmers at Delhi borders said, “If the government wants to see us, let them.” Their persistence forced repeal of farm laws (Indian Express).
Campaign transparency: BJP’s WhatsApp IT cells revealed how unchecked corporate-political data flows distort democracy.
Public infrastructure: UPI shows how state-backed, open platforms can check monopolies if guarded from capture.

4. Legal: Guardrails for Freedom

Preventing exclusions: Santoshi Kumari’s 2017 starvation death from Aadhaar cancellation shows the stakes of weak safeguards.
Algorithmic accountability: Without transparency, gig workers remain at the mercy of “black box” blocks (Scroll.in, 2023).
Safeguarding dissent: With over 700 internet shutdowns in India (2012–22), laws must treat connectivity as a democratic right, not a privilege.

A Final Word

Hannah Arendt reminds us that freedom is realized when people appear together in public, speak, and act as equals. Surveillance shrinks that shared space, replacing trust with fear. Polanyi teaches us that society always pushes back against disembedding markets; today our task is to push back against the commodification of human life itself. And Acemoglu shows us that this struggle will never end—we must run as hard as power does, lest freedom be overtaken.

If Indians—and citizens everywhere—can weave together acts of resistance at the personal, civic, political, and legal levels, then technology can become not a cage but a commons, not an overseer but a partner in human flourishing. The choice is urgent, and it is ours.

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