Transparent Lives ― Surveillance in Canada, the New Transparency Project

Many Canadians are aware that government agencies conduct mass surveillance using phone and online data. Fewer are aware of being under constant surveillance in their everyday lives. We cannot walk downtown, attend a class, pay with a credit card, hop on an airplane, or make a phone call without data being captured and processed. Where does it go? Who makes use of it? Is loss of control of our personal data the price paid for social media and electronic communications, or do we tolerate a system that makes us visible — and thus vulnerable — to others as never before? Experts from a seven-year multi-disciplinary research project explain how surveillance is expanding — mostly unchecked — into every facet of our lives, and what to do about it.

The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting — a Major Collaborative Research Initiative funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada — seeks to understand the factors contributing to the expansion of surveillance as a technology of governance, including its underlying principles, technological infrastructures, and institutional frameworks, and to elucidate the social consequences of surveillance for institutions and for ordinary people. Transparent Lives reflects research conducted during the first half of this seven-year project. The volume was jointly authored by eleven members of the New Transparency team: Colin J. Bennett, Andrew Clement, Arthur Cockfield, Aaron Doyle, Kevin D. Haggerty, Stephane Leman-Langlois, David Lyon, Benjamin Muller, David Murakami Wood, Laureen Snider, and Valerie Steeves.