Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Technology in Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/techsoc Contemporary technology management practices for facilitating social regulation and surveillance Rodrigo Martínez-Béjar a,b , Gaspar Brändle c,* a Department of Information Engineering and Communications, Faculty of Information Technology, University of Murcia, Spain b Fundación para la Investigación y el Desarrollo Tecnológico de la Sociedad del Conocimiento, Spain c Department of Sociology, Faculty of Economics, University of Murcia, Spain ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Social control Surveillance Privacy ICTs Biometrics ABSTRACT The opportunities provided by new technologies signify that current societies have an unlimited number of possibilities as regards improving the quality of their citizens' lives. Governments and some corporations may simultaneously use such technologies to achieve some of their goals with a greater effectiveness than before. However, the usages that governments and corporations make of these technologies could lead to an in- stitutionalisation of practices that may be questionable. These practices embrace the access and use of con- fidential or private information by governments, in addition to corporative practices that may violate some fundamental liberties when corporations act as government collaborators. The goal of this research is to describe some of the most recent socially-relevant social control and surveil- lance practices carried out by governments, along with the irregular personal information management practices of corporations, through the use of Information and Communication Technologies in the European Union and North American regions. The research data have been taken from (academic, media, civil society and cor- porative) publications available from the beginning of the 2000s to the present. The findings show a wide variety of practices (e. G. mass surveillance or the violation of personal information privacy), which appear to be more institutionalised in North America, and particularly in the United States, than anywhere else in the European Union or Canada. 1. Introduction Individuals from advanced societies are subject to observation, scanning, digitisation, etc., by the authorities in order to facilitate re- cognition and identification and, ultimately, to achieve a minimum level of social control. To this end, the authorities use new generation technologies to implement several practices. Perhaps one of the most recent and illustrative examples of the usefulness of such surveillance by the security forces is the central role played by the data obtained, primarily as result of these practices, in the resolution of the bomb attack at the Boston Marathon in 2013. However, events such as the cases of Edward Snowden or Julian Assange show that there have also been illegal practices within the framework of the surveillance to which our society is subject. Without questioning the efficacy of new technologies as regards solving complex social and economic problems, one may wonder whether our societies have any limits by which to control our privacy. Authorities and large corporations have frequently invoked security against terrorism and improving individuals' quality of life as arguments to justify surveillance and the spread of biometric controls. However, the vast majority of society ignores the nature of the personal information that, as citizens or users of contemporary technologies, people put into the hands of authorities and large corporations. For example, almost every time we use the Internet to connect to a service or use an app, we click on to accept a document that contains a large number of conditions and terms of use without being aware of what exactly we are accepting [57]. And we very often do this because of the desire to communicate with others [76]. As [5] puts forward, the default options could be a risk for users because those options convey information sharing. In other words, there is always a risk for Internet service users that their private information may be made publicly available by these services. In addition to this, default settings vary over time, and this could cause problems for users if they do not review the changes made. Furthermore, all the transactions implied in these uses, such as those made by means of whatsapps, chats, messages, tweets, informa- tion searches, commercial transactions, etc., leave a digital trace with some personal information that is stored in large databases and files in https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2018.04.003 Received 27 April 2017; Received in revised form 16 April 2018; Accepted 23 April 2018 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: rodrigo@um.es (R. Martínez-Béjar), gbrandle@um.es (G. Brändle). Technology in Society xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0160-791X/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Martínez-Béjar, R., Technology in Society (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2018.04.003