Similarly, obedience to authority in data colonialism is promoted through a quasi-paranoid self-monitoring feeling that “we live in public” but that we need not worry too much about it because everyone else is also being watched. We need not worry, that is, as long as we have “done nothing wrong.” If the panopticon effect relied on our inability to tell exactly when we were being watched, so that we behaved all the time as though we were, the “inverse panopticon effect” of pervasive data surveillance relies on us knowing that we are being watched all the time but lapsing into behaving as though we are not, thus naturalizing acceptance of a world in which surveillance and continuous tracking operate unnoted in the background.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 323