The Surveillance We Volunteered For

Here is a capability that would have seemed like science fiction, or a nightmare, to almost everyone who ever lived before us: you can now know, at most moments, roughly where your partner is, whether they have read your message, when they were last online, who they follow, what they like, and what they were doing an hour ago — much of it without even asking. The tools that deliver this are marketed as connection, convenience, safety. And they are, sometimes, all of those things. But they have also handed ordinary people a power that ordinary people are not well equipped to hold: the power to watch each other, continuously, in detail.

I want to suggest that this surveillance — the soft, volunteered, mutual kind, not the dramatic stalking kind — is quietly corroding something that intimacy cannot survive without. Because trust is not built by verification. It is, in a sense, the thing you have instead of verification. And the more we can verify, the less we are practising the thing that the verification was supposed to replace.

Trust is what you have instead of evidence

Start with what trust actually is, because the surveillance tools quietly attack its foundation. To trust someone is precisely to extend them confidence in the absence of proof — to believe in their good faith without needing to verify it moment to moment. Trust is, by definition, what fills the space where certainty isn't. If you could verify everything, you would not need trust at all; you would just have data.

This is why trust has to be built, and why the building requires uncertainty. Every time you do not check, and your faith turns out to be warranted, the trust deepens. The not-checking is not incidental to trust — it is the very exercise that strengthens it, the way a muscle strengthens under load. A relationship grows secure through repeated experiences of extending confidence and having it honoured. The uncertainty is the raw material; the choice to trust anyway is the work; the honoured trust is the result. Remove the uncertainty, and you remove the conditions under which trust is built at all.

What the tools do to that

Now introduce the surveillance tools, and watch what happens to that delicate process. Suddenly you can check. You can see the location, the read receipt, the last-online time, the follow, the like. And the very availability of checking changes everything, whether or not you act on it.

If you check, you have replaced trust with verification — and verification, unlike trust, never compounds into security. It has to be repeated endlessly, because each check only tells you about this moment, not the next. The checking becomes a habit, then a need, then a low anxiety that can never be fully satisfied, because there is always one more thing that could be verified. And if you don't check, the tools still corrode something, because now not-checking requires active restraint against a constantly available option, rather than being simply the natural condition of a relationship. The uncertainty that trust needs as its raw material has been removed, and in its place is a permanent, nagging possibility of certainty that you must either indulge or effortfully resist. Either way, the conditions that built trust the old way are gone.

The jealousy machine

There is a crueller layer, because the tools do not just enable checking — they manufacture the suspicion that drives it. The feed supplies an endless stream of ambiguous data points: a like on someone else's photo, a new follower, a location that does not quite match the story, a reply time that seems too slow or too fast. None of these mean anything on their own. But the tools present them, constantly, as evidence to be interpreted, and the anxious mind is extraordinarily good at building a case from fragments.

So the surveillance tools become a jealousy machine, generating suspicion out of noise and then offering more surveillance as the cure for the suspicion they created. The more you watch, the more ambiguous data you gather; the more ambiguous data, the more suspicion; the more suspicion, the more you watch. It is a closed loop, and it runs on exactly the engagement the platforms are built to maximise — because a jealous, anxious person checking their partner's activity forty times a day is, from the platform's point of view, a beautifully engaged user. Your corroding relationship is, to the machine, a success metric.

Choosing not to watch

The way out is counterintuitive, because it means deliberately giving up a power you have been handed — and that always feels, at first, like exposure rather than freedom.

It is the choice not to check, made on purpose, as the active practice of trust rather than its absence. It is treating the surveillance tools' availability as a temptation to be declined rather than a convenience to be used — recognising that every check is a small withdrawal from the trust account, and every restrained non-check a small deposit. It is, hardest of all, choosing to extend confidence without proof in a world that constantly offers proof, because that extension is the only thing that actually builds the security you are anxiously seeking through surveillance. The certainty the tools offer is a counterfeit of the security trust provides — it feels like safety, but it never compounds, never settles, never lets you rest, because it has to be renewed with every passing hour.

We volunteered for this surveillance, mistaking the ability to watch for a form of closeness. But you cannot watch your way to trust; the watching is the opposite of the thing it pretends to serve. The people in the most secure relationships are not the ones who verify the most. They are the ones who have chosen, deliberately, to verify less than they could — who have left the uncertainty intact on purpose, because they understood that the uncertainty was never the enemy of trust. It was the space in which trust was always meant to grow.