Transparency should be a tool for holding the powerful and our institutions accountable. When directed downwards, transparency is a tool of control, writes Daniel Horen Greenford. Image by Electronic Frontier Foundation/Flickr.

Many Canadians are up in arms over the latest infringements, real or perceived, on their privacy. The conservative backlash against the 2026 census and growing concern over the implementation of Bill C-22, which will greatly expand the powers of Canada’s law enforcement and spy agencies, are only the most recent examples of citizens expressing their wariness of state surveillance. But confining our concern to government overreach overlooks the private actors who surveil us far more thoroughly. Indeed, corporations act as self-interested entities, wielding their incredible data-harvesting powers to sell our digital doubles and precious attention to advertisers and political operatives, or rig online prices to squeeze as much out of us as they can with every purchase. They also operate as an extension of the state, collecting reams of information on our communications, whereabouts, and behaviour—ready to hand it over with a modicum of legal, or extra-legal, justification.

The recent national conversation has focused on C-22 and the new ways it could grant the government access to our private lives. But the devil isn’t in the technical details of how we’re being watched and catalogued. What’s missing is how the state’s increasing subservience to private interests complicates surveillance, dissolving the line between government rule and corporate exploitation. The overlapping interests and roles of public institutions and private enterprises complicate who is watching us and to what end. Is surveillance being used to economically exploit us or to keep us pliant subjects? Is there even any meaningful difference between these anymore?

But we’re giving up much more than our commodified selves. The real cost of being watched isn’t the loss of privacy itself—it’s what privacy makes possible: a self that can wonder, doubt, and make up its own mind. Make people feel that they are never alone, that they’re always being observed, and you strip that away. You don’t just expose people; you disarm them. People begin to think and act in ways that anticipate an audience. They subconsciously ask how it would appear to an observer judging them—am I being weird? Am I being seditious? Conviction, and the courage to act on it, needs a private place to take root. That’s what’s really at stake in the fight over surveillance—and it’s why so many of us are getting hung up on the wrong details.

Connecting the dots between state and corporate surveillance

Let’s go back to this spring and the hullabaloo over the census. A smattering of right-wing libertarians kicked up a fuss over how the census was an unjust infringement on their privacy by an overbearing state. They refused to fill out their cards. They ripped them up. Some even burned them. Their concern and righteous indignation were well-founded but misdirected. In an era when tens of thousands of data points encoding our most intimate personal details and online behaviour are collected and stored by unaccountable private corporations, the government knowing how many people live with you under the same roof seems benign, to put it lightly. However misplaced their anger was, people can destroy their census cards far more easily than they can opt out of surveillance capitalism.

While an impotent act of misdirected resistance, their protest has a logic. People who burned their census cards believe the government takes so much from them and gives so little back. But if the government is wasteful and incompetent, that’s largely because the state has been hollowed out by policy choices cheered on and lobbied for by private interests, who then instrumentalized its decline to sell the narrative that government is ineffective, all to justify further cuts and transfer more power from the public to the private sector. We’ve been consumers so long we’ve forgotten how to be citizens—trained to resent the state that merely counts us, while shrugging at the corporations that know us intimately. And, as with all right-wing villains, the scapegoats—ineffective government, dangerous or entitled migrants, anyone except the super-rich—are defenceless punching bags, easier to fight than the actual culprits.

Thankfully, conservatives and progressives alike have been sounding the alarm about one of the most serious threats to privacy in years. Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act—a successor to last summer’s spiked Strong Borders Act—was just rammed through the House of Commons by a Liberal majority, despite concerted pushback from privacy and security experts, and even some Big Tech companies. The federal government hastily introduced a barrage of amendments, and in a rush to pass the bill before summer recess, abruptly ended its third reading and sent it to the Senate. Neither parliamentarians nor experts were given a chance to study the changes, and the government told us to take it on faith that they were substantive safeguards against the most egregious measures its original version would have allowed, like backdoors to end-to-end encryption—which could allow third parties to access the content of private communications—or tracking all devices in real-time. Some advocates aren’t convinced and say the amendments are just “cosmetic changes to a fundamentally flawed bill.”

Bill C-22 is part of an effort to remove the remaining barriers between private and state surveillance, further integrating the data collection of private companies with the surveillance powers of the state. Big Brother wants to subsume big data. And Big Tech will ultimately benefit, having worked tirelessly to capture the state alongside other powerful industries like Big Oil. While the mainstream press has cheerfully reported on the tech firms publicly opposing C-22’s most nefarious provisions, it has not reported that not all of Silicon Valley shares their objections. Companies like Oracle—a data behemoth on par with Google and Meta—quietly welcomed Ottawa’s encroachment on the last inviolable digital spaces. They haven’t vocally championed the government’s expanding surveillance tentacles, but their silence is tacit approval. Oracle’s leadership aren’t fussed with keeping up the appearances of restraint that Meta espouses, because their business model doesn’t depend on consumers trusting them. The company’s executive chairman Larry Ellison has openly mused that ubiquitous AI surveillance will keep citizens “on their best behaviour.”

Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp echoes Ellison’s sentiment. In his book-length manifesto, Karp draws on a common misinterpretation of the Milgram experiments to argue that people are by nature conformists, and that pressure from an authority figure—be it in a lab coat or an all-seeing state—makes people willing participants in bloody exercises of power. Tech oligarchs like Ellison and Karp are counting on an expanded surveillance state to serve as the lab-coated witness as the state implores you to delate your colleagues and neighbours as enemies. Consumer-facing tech companies like Meta need you to feel they have your best interests at heart, so that you feel no friction or compunction in surrendering your innermost thoughts and desires to them—and to the clients who purchase your digital double. The Oracles and Metas of the world both know that a........

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