The Surveillance of the Victim: Visibility, Privacy and the Crisis of Bodies in Franciscan Thought

We live in an “age of accelerations,” where the volume and velocity of change impact and affect every sector of our lives (personal, social, cultural, psychological and spiritual). No arena of our lives has proliferated as quickly or as thoroughly as the widespread collection and often re‐sale of personal information by government and law enforcement agencies, global social media corporations, retail and e‐commerce digital platforms, mobile telecommunications and smart infrastructure systems. We are constantly being surveilled and vast amounts of data about us are being abstracted, collected, digested, analyzed, reconfigured and processed through algorithms to determine our preferences, beliefs, hopes, and commercializable desires. David Lyon has defined surveillance as “any systematic and routine attention to personal details, whether specific or aggregate for a defined purpose. That purpose, the intention of the surveillance practice, may be to protect, understand, care for, ensure entitlement, control, manage or influence individuals or groups” (Lyon 2018: 3).

We are surveilled by military intelligence, government administrations, at work, for crime control and our consumer activity. Our bodies are being scanned, monitored and evaluated at airports and on street corners, and our biometric details in the form of facial recognition, iris and fingerprint patterns are increasingly being sought by states, corporations, institutions, medical agencies, and insurance companies for a host of reasons, both benign and troubling. Rationales of terrorist threat and border infiltration by the criminal ‘other’ have intensified the call for increased security and scrutiny. This rapid acceleration and assemblage of personal data has up until now outpaced theological evaluation. In this article, we will outline the scope of the surveillance situation we face and are likely to confront in the near future. We will then speak about the limits of our present implied “theology of privacy” as an adequate remediation to the social justice issues now arising. Then, we will offer Francis of Assisi’s “embrace of the leper” as a potential contribution to the dialogue just beginning on a “theology of surveillance.” We focus on the surveillance of the victim because it is the victim of abuse that is most at risk of being silenced, ignored, diminished and made ‘invisible’ as non‐persons even by churches committed to the providential surveillance of a liberating God (Couturier 2019).

Surveillance and data analytics

In its annual report of how much data is collected each minute across the globe, cloud software firm DOMO details the exploding amount of information collected about us: “The world’s internet population is growing significantly year‐over‐year. As of January 2019, the internet reaches 56.1% of the world’s population and now represents 4.39 billion people—a 9% increase from January 2018."¹ As Nicole Martin, an expert on AI and big data indicates, Americans are producing and giving up vast (and permanent) amounts of information about themselves (without compensation) every minute of the day:

Overall, Americans use 4,416,720 GB of internet data including 188,000,000 emails, 18,100,000 texts and 4,497,420 Google searches every single minute.

We communicate through our phones more than just by calling. Along with the millions of texts and emails sent each minute, Skype users make 231,840 calls and people are tweeting out their thoughts at 511,200 tweets a minute.

App downloads are on the rise with 390,030 a minute. There are millions of apps now available to do pretty much anything you can think of. You can post photos to Instagram (277,777 stories per minute) or send funny gifs to friends (4,800,000 gifs per minute.) You can even find yourself a soulmate, or maybe just a date, with Tinder swipes at 1,400,000 a minute.²

Our preferences, choices, beliefs, and desires are then being marked, scrutinized, evaluated and analyzed for their commercial value and competitive advantage. They are being used and/or sold on the open and ever rapidly growing personal data marketplace for advertising, strategic marketing and customer management purposes (Cinnamon 2017). Our personal data is not simply being accumulated in some anonymous repository in the cloud to...