Senior research fellow Jon Penney spoke with Tech Policy Press about his new book, Chilling Effects, and how rising surveillance is causing people to self-censor. 

Penney notes that the fear of having a digital persona or profile that follows us forever can have a “profound chill in how people…live their lives.” Beyond self-censoring in certain contexts, he argues that this sense of surveillance is shaping “the baseline of how we live,” which is “really, really worrying for a healthy democratic society.”

The concept of chilling effects, and how we respond to them, is a “struggle over power, information, and broader structural power relationships in society,” Penney says.