“Big Brother is watching you”: the acceptability of government online monitoring in thirty European countries (according to the EVS 2017)

Abstract

The paper focuses on the attitude of the citizens of European countries to the government online monitoring of public spaces and of electronic personal correspondence. Although the electronic monitoring of public and private online communication is technically feasible, it encounters the public debates about its acceptability and the risks of transforming online communication into a virtual panopticon. The paper discusses sociological explanations of the observed variations in the attitude to various kinds of online social control, including the sociodemographic factors and cross-country differences in the countries of the European Values Study (EVS 2017).