Sociedades monitorizadasprácticas de control social y vigilancia a través de la tecnología

Abstract

Thanks to the possibilities offered by new technologies, individuals from societies in European and Northernamerican countries, at least, have in their vast majority access to a large number of possibilities to increase their quality of life. In these societies, their governments and certain corporations, whose economic activity tends to be globalized, have at their disposal the technologies in question that allow them to achieve their goals more effectively. However, the use of these technologies by governments and corporations may lead to the institutionalization of practices that entail access to, and / or exploitation of, private or confidential information without the express authorization of the affected individuals. In addition, it is possible that corporate practices may occur that may violate certain individual freedoms based on collaboration with the executive powers of the States in which these corporations have their headquarters. The purpose of the research presented in this thesis was to know more and better the institutionalized practices of social control and irregular management of personal information, mediated through information and communication technologies, carried out by both corporations and governments, in the European and North American sphere since the end of the 1990s. In order to achieve the objectives set in this research, a descriptive-exploratory approach has been carried out, using the qualitative analysis methodology, specifically content analysis, to analyze both secondary sources of data and the privacy policies collected in this investigation. Thus, through content analysis, both the most relevant contemporary practices supported by ICTs, which have been instrumentalized to exercise social control and surveillance, carried out by the governments under investigation over the last two decades, as well as the different sections that integrated privacy policies were analyzed for the case of the technology corporations selected in this research. The results of this research indicate that, within the geopolitical framework indicated, the United States is the country where this type of practices is more institutionalized in both the public and private sectors. Among the most widespread practices by the governments studied, there is participation, directly or indirectly, in the mass espionage network launched in 2001, the records of digital transmissions, the erroneous preventive detentions based on mass surveillance, the neglect of citizen complaints for breach of European corporate legislation regarding the provision of stored data to users or police video surveillance without judicial authorization or express acceptance of those affected. On the other hand, a variety of corporate practices have been found that ara against personal data and information privacy, mainly among large technological corporations, such as the violation of user privacy, the sending of user data to governments without knowledge of those, publication of search histories of anonymous users, participation in the listening program telephone, customer surveillance based on their activity on the Internet, record of the history and content of user communications on the platform, frequent changes to their privacy rules or search records of each user. This research is expected to be useful also to other researchers, technologies corporations and public institutions, at least in western societies, to establish new ways of using new information and communication technologies that do not imply the loss of control of users regarding the data and personal information that they provide directly or indirectly when using such technologies.