Track chairs
Dr Oliver G Kayas, Liverpool John Moores University, UK 
Dr Anand Sheombar, University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, Netherlands 

Track description 
Advances in digital technologies—such as artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, big data, biometrics, facial recognition, machine learning algorithms, location tracking devices, sensors, smartphones, smart homes, and social media networks—have enabled unprecedented forms of data collection, monitoring, and analysis (Kayas, 2023; Kayas et al., 2025; Mettler, 2023). This raises critical questions about the implications of surveillance and privacy across multiple levels of contemporary society, from national and state governance in the global north and global south, to organisational operations, institutional practices, and individual experiences (Lyon et al., 2012; Roberts et al., 2023; Singh, 2024). At the national and state levels, surveillance technologies raise profound privacy questions about citizenship, (digital) rights, and state power (Albrechtslund, 2005; Basu, 2019; Roberts, 2025), while at the organisational and institutional levels, surveillance practices reshape cities, work, education, healthcare, policing, politics, security, civic space, and service provision (Lyon, 2007; Sheombar & Klovig Skelton, 2025; Wood & Steeves, 2021). At the individual level, surveillance technologies increasingly blur the boundaries between public and private life and have significant implications for children, consumers, citizens, employees, marginalised communities, patients, and students to name a few (Lyon et al., 2012). This track invites scholarly engagement with the complex dynamics of surveillance and privacy through the examination of their multifaceted implications for societies, states, organisations, institutions, and individuals. By addressing these pressing issues, this track contributes to the conference’s commitment to fostering critical debate on the most pressing Information Systems challenges of our time. 

Track areas include but are not limited to:

  • Mass surveillance and national security: ethical, legal, and social implications 
  • Algorithmic surveillance: bias, discrimination, and accountability 
  • Workplace surveillance and employee privacy 
  • Surveillance in education: learning analytics and proctoring technologies 
  • Healthcare surveillance: digital health monitoring and patient privacy 
  • Smart cities and urban surveillance: governance and citizen rights 
  • Facial recognition technologies: deployment, resistance, and regulation 
  • Policing: big data, predictive policing, and racialised surveillance 
  • Surveillance capitalism: data harvesting, consumer behaviour, and market power 
  • Social media platforms as surveillance infrastructures 
  • Surveillance, privacy, and marginalised communities: disproportionate impacts 
  • Resistance to surveillance: activism and counter-surveillance 
  • Regulatory frameworks (e.g., GDPR): emerging global standards on surveillance and privacy
  • Surveillance in the global south: power dynamics, digital colonialism, and localised resistance 
  • State surveillance and democratic freedoms: balancing security and civil liberties 
  • Children’s privacy and surveillance in digital environments 
  • Surveillance in migration and border control systems 
  • Data justice and the ethics of data collection 
  • Surveillance, privacy, and the future of AI-driven decision-making 

References
Albrechtslund, A. (2005). The Postmodern Panopticon: Surveillance and Privacy in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing Sixth International Conference of Computer Ethics, The Netherlands.

Basu, A. (2019). Extraterritorial Algorithmic Surveillance and the Incapacitation of International Human Rights Law. NUJS Law Review, 189, 189-215.

Kayas, O. G. (2023). Workplace surveillance: A systematic review, integrative framework, and research agenda. Journal of Business Research, 168, 114212.

Kayas, O. G., Chin, E. O., & Belal, H. M. (2025). From humans to algorithms: a sociotechnical framework of workplace surveillance. Digital Business(100120).

Lyon, D. (2007). Surveillance studies: an overview. Polity Press.

Lyon, D., Haggerty, K. D., & Ball, K. (2012). Introducing surveillance studies. In K. Ball, D. Lyon, & K. D. Haggerty (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (pp. 1-12). Routledge.

Mettler, T. (2023). The connected workplace: characteristics and social consequences of work surveillance in the age of datafication, sensorization, and artificial intelligence. Journal of Information Technology, 39(3), 547-567.

Roberts, T. (2025). Understanding Digital Rights: Definitions, Conceptions, and Myths.

Roberts, T., Gitahi, J., Allam, P., Oboh, L., Adekunle Oladapo, O., Appiah-Adjei, G., & Sheombar, A. (2023). Mapping the supply of surveillance technologies to Africa: case studies from Nigeria, Ghana, Morocco, Malawi, and Zambia.

Sheombar, A., & Klovig Skelton, S. (2025). Who supplies digital surveillance technologies to African governments? Pathways for resistance. In T. Roberts & A. Mare (Eds.), Digital Surveillance in Africa: Power, Agency, and Rights (pp. 183-210). Zed Books.

Singh, S. (2024). Digital surveillance and valuation in datafied societies. In A. Krüger, T. Peetz, & H. Schaefer (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Valuation and Society. Routledge.

Wood, D. M., & Steeves, V. (2021). Smart Surveillance. Surveillance & Society, 19(2), 150-153.