Also known as: mass surveillance · surveillance capitalism · commercial spyware
Surveillance in the privacy context refers to the systematic monitoring of individuals' communications, movements, or behaviour, whether conducted by states for security purposes or by companies for commercial ones.
The distinction between state and commercial surveillance has eroded considerably. Governments increasingly purchase data from commercial brokers — location histories, app telemetry — obtaining information that would otherwise require legal process to compel.
Commercial spyware sold to state clients, capable of compromising fully-patched phones through zero-click exploits, has been repeatedly documented targeting journalists, lawyers, and dissidents, prompting sanctions and litigation but not the disappearance of the market.
Metadata
Metadata is the information surrounding a communication rather than its content — who contacted whom, when, for how long, from where, and how frequently — which remains visible even when the content itself is encrypted.
Data Broker
A data broker is a company that collects personal information from public records, commercial transactions, apps, and online activity, then aggregates and sells it to other organisations — typically without any direct relationship with the individuals concerned.
Browser Fingerprinting
Browser fingerprinting is a tracking technique that identifies a user by combining observable characteristics of their device and browser — screen resolution, installed fonts, graphics rendering behaviour, time zone — into a signature distinctive enough to recognise across sites.
End-to-End Encryption
End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a system in which messages are encrypted on the sender's device and decrypted only on the recipient's, so that no intermediary — including the service provider — can read the content in transit or at rest on its servers.
Zero-Day
A zero-day is a software vulnerability that attackers know about and exploit before the vendor has released a patch, leaving defenders zero days to prepare a fix.