Lateral Surveillance

In today's society, many things are rarely considered private anymore as governments and their agencies are surveilling citizens' every move on and offline. However, it is not only governments and their agencies that are surveilling us, we tend to surveil each other especially online. This form of supervision is called lateral surveillance which is also known as peer-to-peer surveillance and it consists of individuals surveilling others in order to keep track of one another. In addition, the categories of peoples' lives that peer-to-peer surveillance often tracks are other peoples' romantic interests, family, and friends. For instance, finding friends on Facebook in order to keep up with their lives is considered lateral surveillance as well as looking up an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend to see if they have moved on. Although many people may not consider this a form of surveilling, I would argue that as a result of new digital technologies, we have access to information on people that we didn't have before and we don't require their permission in order to access it, so therefore it becomes surveilling.