Written before surveillance became a permanent headline, the book traces how monitoring migrates from the security state into the workplace, the home, the self.

Davies is less interested in how convenience, safety and efficiency become the language through which visibility is normalised. What emerges is a study of power in its administrative form — databases, biometric systems, information flows — and the subtle recalibration of privacy that follows.

A slim but prescient text that sits comfortably alongside early digital-ethics writing, it reads now as groundwork for debates that have since intensified.