A Roadmap for Confronting the Chilling Effects of Censorship, Surveillance and New Technology

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.