Digital Surveillance, Privacy Norms, and Social Control in Platform Societies

Abstract

The pervasive digital surveillance enabled by social media platforms, mobile devices, smart city infrastructure, and workplace monitoring systems has transformed the sociology of social control. Zuboff’s (2019) concept of surveillance capitalism identifies a new economic logic in which behavioral data extracted from users becomes the raw material for predictive products sold to behavioral modification markets. This paper situates digital surveillance within the classical sociological tradition of social control theory, from Foucault’s (1975) panopticon to contemporary dataveillance, examining how the architecture of visibility has shifted from exceptional to routine, from institutional to distributed, and from disciplinary to predictive. We analyze three domains of digital surveillance—consumer behavioral tracking, workplace monitoring, and state surveillance—and their implications for privacy norms, conformity behavior, and the sociological concept of autonomy. Drawing on Nissenbaum’s (2010) contextual integrity framework and Lyon’s (2007) surveillance studies tradition, we argue that platform surveillance represents a qualitatively new form of social control that requires updated theoretical frameworks.