This paper aims to provide an overview of surveillance theories and concepts that can help to understand and debate surveillance in its many forms. As scholars from an increasingly wide range of disciplines are discussing surveillance, this literature review can offer much-needed common ground for the debate. We structure surveillance theory in three roughly chronological/thematic phases. The first two conceptualise surveillance through comprehensive theoretical frameworks which are elaborated in the third phase. The first phase, featuring Bentham and Foucault, offers architectural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is often physical and spatial, involving centralised mechanisms of watching over subjects. Panoptic structures function as architectures of power, not only directly but also through (self-) disciplining of the watched subjects. The second phase offers infrastructural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is networked and relies primarily on digital rather than physical technologies. It involves distributed forms of watching over people, with increasing distance to the watched and often dealing with data doubles rather than physical persons. Deleuze, Haggerty and Ericson, and Zuboff develop different theoretical frameworks than panopticism to conceptualise the power play involved in networked surveillance. The third phase of scholarship refines, combines or extends the main conceptual frameworks developed earlier. Surveillance theory branches out to conceptualise surveillance through concepts such as dataveillance, access control, social sorting, peer-to-peer surveillance and resistance. With the datafication of society, surveillance combines the physical with the digital, government with corporate surveillance and top-down with self-surveillance.

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Smart city projects in Europe and North America are employing a novel approach to data analysis that processes hardly any or no personal data at all. As such, these projects—at least, for the most part—escape the scope of (European) data protection law. The idea behind this new approach to smartness can be condensed in the statement: “smart cities are only Big Brother to the masses.” In other words, if the data collected within smart city projects do not identify any individuals, then there are no issues with privacy and data protection law. This problematic assumption relies on two reductive understandings of key notions in this context: that of “personal privacy” and “personal surveillance.” In this contribution, I focus on the latter and call for a broader understanding of surveillance as a set of diverse modes of social control by privacy law scholars. After all, in order to reveal the underlying dynamics of power and how these might lead to surveillance abuse—even, or especially, when surveillance is based on the processing of seemingly non-personal data—concrete surveillance practices and their logics need to be examined. For this purpose, I take the example of the Stratumseind Living Lab in the Netherlands and examine it through the lens of Foucault’s notion of security. This examination leads to two valuable insights for privacy and data protection law scholars. First of all, it strengthens the argument of contemporary group privacy scholars that a narrow focus on individual privacy and surveillance is inadequate and that the regulatory framework needs to be adapted. The second insight raises another broad issue: smart cities, which function according to the securitizing logic of surveillance, such as the Stratumseind Living Lab, are transforming public spaces into consumption spaces. Yet, the protection of privacy in public can and should serve to protect key aspects of public space—political participation and sociability—as well.

This chapter provides an overview of key surveillance theories and their implications for law and regulation. It presents three stages of theories that characterize changes in thinking about surveillance in society and the disciplining, controlling, and entertaining functions of surveillance. Beginning with Bentham’s Panopticons and Foucault’s panopticism to discipline surveillees, surveillance theory then develops accounts of surveillant assemblages and networked surveillance that control consumers and their data doubles, to finally branch out to theorizing current modes of surveillance, such as sousveillance and participatory surveillance. Next, surveillance technologies and practices associated with these stages are discussed. The chapter concludes by highlighting the implications for regulators and lawmakers who face the challenge of regulating converging, hybrid surveillant infrastructures and assemblages, both in their context-dependent specificity and in their cumulative effect on citizen/consumers.

This chapter explicates that the smart city is defined by a techno-utopian discourse, which presents smart technology as a value-neutral and rational tool in solving all kinds of urban problems. After analyzing several ethical issues relating to the smart city concept, Lefebvre's notion of the "right to the city" from the 1960s is examined. While the Lefebvrian "right to the city" is a utopian project, it offers an opportunity to reflect upon what an emancipatory and fair smart city should be like. We examine the current debate on the smart city by looking at three contemporary perspectives on the "right to the city." The chapter concludes by describing three trajectories that could lead to a more open, flexible, diverse, and participatory smart city, particularly in relation to issues of (a) participation, (b) communing, and (c) citizenship. These trajectories are illustrated by providing examples of different smart initiatives in the city of Barcelona.