Surveillance and Digital Freedom: The Cost of Being Watched

This week’s Field Notes reveal a common thread across debates on surveillance, privacy, and digital rights: the greatest threat to digital freedom is often not censorship itself, but the growing normalization of being watched.

The Freedom on the Net 2025 report showed that global internet freedom has declined for the fifteenth consecutive year, with governments increasingly relying on digital surveillance and monitoring technologies. At the same time, Privacy International’s challenge to the UK government highlighted how surveillance can operate beyond public scrutiny, raising concerns about accountability and democratic oversight. Together, these cases suggest that freedom is increasingly shaped not only by what governments prohibit, but by what citizens believe is being observed.

The EFF’s analysis of Amazon Ring expands this discussion beyond governments. Surveillance is no longer limited to state institutions; it is increasingly embedded in everyday technologies marketed for convenience and security. As cameras, data collection systems, and smart devices become part of ordinary life, surveillance risks becoming culturally normalized rather than openly contested.

ARTICLE 19’s discussion of the UN resolution on human rights defenders further illustrates the human impact of these trends. Activists, journalists, and civil society leaders increasingly face digital monitoring, spyware, and online tracking. In this context, protecting freedom of expression requires protecting the digital spaces where participation takes place.

Taken together, these developments point to a broader shift. The central question is no longer whether surveillance exists, but how much surveillance a society accepts before it begins to reshape behavior itself. When people hesitate to speak, organize, or participate because they feel constantly observed, freedom can erode without a single law explicitly restricting it.

As civic life continues to move online, safeguarding digital freedom may become one of the defining human rights challenges of the twenty-first century. The future of free expression may depend not only on the right to speak, but on the confidence that one can do so without fear of being watched.