Introduction

Individuals from advanced societies are subject to observation, scanning, digitisation, etc., by the authorities in order to facilitate recognition and identification and, ultimately, to achieve a minimum level of social control. To this end, the authorities use new generation technologies to implement several practices. Perhaps one of the most recent and illustrative examples of the usefulness of such surveillance by the security forces is the central role played by the data obtained, primarily as result of these practices, in the resolution of the bomb attack at the Boston Marathon in 2013. However, events such as the cases of Edward Snowden or Julian Assange show that there have also been illegal practices within the framework of the surveillance to which our society is subject. Without questioning the efficacy of new technologies as regards solving complex social and economic problems, one may wonder whether our societies have any limits by which to control our privacy. Authorities and large corporations have frequently invoked security against terrorism and improving individuals’ quality of life as arguments to justify surveillance and the spread of biometric controls. However, the vast majority of society ignores the nature of the personal information that, as citizens or users of contemporary technologies, people put into the hands of authorities and large corporations. For example, almost every time we use the Internet to connect to a service or use an app, we click on to accept a document that contains a large number of conditions and terms of use without being aware of what exactly we are accepting (Palfrey and Zittrain, 2011). And we very often do this because of the desire to communicate with others (Turkle, 2011). As Boyd (2013) puts forward, the default options could be a risk for users because those options convey information sharing. In other words, there is always a risk for Internet service users that their private information may be made publicly available by these services. In addition to this, default settings vary over time, and this could cause problems for users if they do not review the changes made. Furthermore, all the transactions implied in these uses, such as those made by means of whatsapps, chats, messages, tweets, information searches, commercial transactions, etc., leave a digital trace with some personal information that is stored in large databases and files in which it is possible to identify us (Tufekci, 2014). ‘Globalisation’ also takes place more and more frequently with our data (Vaidhyanathan, 2011). This is in line with the claims put forward by Lippert and Newell (2016), who also state that attention should be paid to the fact that the business models of large Internet companies, such as Facebook and Google, involve the very efficient collection of users’ data.