Societal Surveillance Market by Technology, Solution, Applications, and Services 2020 – 2025

Overview:
Based on several key drivers, there is a major cultural shift underway towards a surveillance society, which entails primarily observation, tracking, and analysis of human behaviors. Rapidly becoming a social norm in some parts of the world, surveillance gained substantial societal support due to the need to surveil certain individuals that may be foreign state-actor supported terrorists, or in some cases, domestic enemies of the state.

However, other factors, such as state control over civilian behavior have taken the fore with the rise of social credit monitoring and the advent of COVID-19, which have dramatically reinforced the notion that surveilling citizens provides a net benefit to society. Recent concerns and threats stemming from the pandemic have added a new dimension of safety and security to protect human lives. The new expectation will have a longer-term impact of routine behavior and processes. In addition to physical threats associated with pandemics, bad actors also seize the opportunity to engage in various threats against cyber infrastructure.

When viewed as a whole as positive, the notion is that societal surveillance provides greater benefits than losses in terms of overall personal privacy. These benefits may include the ability to mitigate the impact of pandemics. On the other hand, the downside of civil surveillance is considered trading safety for liberty. Especially in the United States, the freedom to act anonymously is considered by many to be a core right of democracy in terms of civil liberties identified in the Bill of Rights.

The ability to identify, track, and correlate digital and physical identity is of paramount importance to the societal surveillance market. By way of example, digital currencies such as Bitcoin provide for a certain level of anonymity in terms of financial transactions. However, the underlying technology in support of crypto-currencies, blockchain technology, is being adopted by China as it looks to unveil a digital-only version of its currency, which would provide unprecedented governmental oversight and control over transactions. This fits with their drive towards a social credit society in which every citizens’ actions are observed and considered.

There is an emerging market for surveilling society, which includes observation, tracking, and data analytics to gather and analyze data. This market also involves the use of additional technologies such as the combination of digital twin technology, augmented and virtual reality to provide an improved means of observing and interacting with citizens. Additionally, governments may leverage the ability to observe citizen behaviors by tracking digital payments in an increasingly cashless global society.

This market also includes the ability to score citizens as part of an overall social credit system that goes beyond “acceptable” and “unacceptable” individual behaviors to focus on government mandates such as compliance with public safety rulings associated with virus outbreaks. This research evaluates the companies, strategies, technologies and solutions involved in this emerging surveillance society market. It provides analysis and forecasting for key technologies and solutions including digital identity, tracking, mobile payments, blockchain technology, social credit systems, digital twins, augmented and virtual reality.

Target Audience:
• Network operators
• AI and big data companies
• Video and surveillance companies
• Digital ID management companies
• Governmental agencies and NGOs

Select Research Findings:
• The ability to identify, track, and correlate digital and physical identity is of paramount importance to the societal surveillance market
• The combination of AI and big data analytics will be leveraged to identify correlations, trends, and predictive capabilities for government
• Blockchain will be adopted by certain sovereign nations as a means to provide a view into citizen behaviors and even control transactions
• The signal highest ROI solution for 5G by far is anytime, anywhere video and the biggest application is placement within smart cities for surveillance
• The role of human-machine trust and the ability for governments to gain visibility, control and mitigation is evolving with AI, IoT, and cybersecurity threats
• What started in China as a social credit system will evolve and expand to other nations as governments see the need to observe, track, and intervene with respect to citizenry