Surveillance

The systematic, focused, and often routine observation of people, their activities, or their data for purposes of influence, management, entitlement, or control. In accessibility and HCI research, surveillance is an analytical frame used to examine how monitoring technologies — workplace monitoring, emotion AI, automated hiring, passive sensing, algorithmic management — reshape power relations between the watched and the watcher. Disabled people are disproportionately affected: disability-related behaviours, assistive-technology use, and medical data are frequent surveillance targets, and surveillance systems historically treat disability as a risk category to be sorted and excluded.