Litigating Corporate Surveillance: Privacy, Autonomy, Power, and Democracy in the Courtroom

This book interrogates the legality of corporate surveillance, offering a corrective approach to protecting privacy through litigation—not through legislation. Explosive revelations, from the Snowden disclosures to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, have shown us that our daily lives are embedded in a network of pervasive, panoptic surveillance designed to manipulate. This corporate surveillance network has grown to encompass and absorb the basic digital substrate of our daily lives. Received wisdom, among commentators, the press, and even legal academia, is that this is all legal: Corporate surveillance has flourished because there are no legal tools to rein in its pervasive and invasive practices. Analyzing recent developments in data privacy law in light of ever-increasing data aggregation and cybersurveillance practices by corporations and governments, this book examines the pervasive, multimodal corporate surveillance practices that now permeate both our digital and offline lives and offers a prescription for fighting back through the courts. Interweaving discussions of the statutory, common law, and constitutional frameworks that are currently being applied in legal challenges to these activities, this book considers current critiques of privacy law as conceptualized by both legal scholars and practitioners. Additionally, it makes suggestions for navigating the future of privacy rights in the face of our increasingly digitized lives. This book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in the field of corporate surveillance, digital law, and privacy law.