Surveillance is the systematic monitoring of human activity for social protection or control.

Evaluation

80,000 Hours rates surveillance a "potential highest priority area": an issue that, if more thoroughly examined, could rank as a top global challenge.^[1]

Further reading

Bostrom, Nick (2019) The vulnerable world hypothesis, Global Policy, vol. 10, pp. 455–476.

Christiano, Paul (2018) Surveil things, not people, The Sideways View, February 2.

Garfinkel, Ben (2018) The future of surveillance, Effective Altruism, October 12.

Segal, Aaron, Joan Feigenbaum & Bryan Ford (2016) Open, privacy-preserving protocols for lawful surveillance, arXiv:1607.03659.

Trask, Andrew (2017) Safe crime detection, I am Trask, June 5.

Related entries

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80,000 Hours (2022) Our current list of pressing world problems, 80,000 Hours.