Someone to Watch Over Me — Gender, Technologies, Privacy and Surveillance

Abstract

The empirical examples in this and Chapters 6 and 7 share a common leitmotiv they are based on privacy and watching and what happens when privacy is breached, where all of these dimensions are to be understood in gender terms. The question of privacy has a strong gender dimension and it is not surprising to find that this is echoed in the digital world. Privacy is a concern not just in terms of ethics; there are also important legal and political dimensions embedded in the concept as the question of whether privacy is different for women and men, and also how this difference can be captured in legislation, continues to be of concern (MacKinnon 1987; DeCew 1997). When we consider privacy we set up a complex ethical equation where the variables of different types of privacy, gender, culture and technologies are all implicated.