Panopticon on a Leash

Our canine and feline companions have quietly become unwitting stars of a massive surveillance experiment. Once upon a time, collars were nothing more than a name tag or a leash, a strip of leather stamped with an address. Now they are often smart devices. A Seattle tech blog noted that the average modern pet collar can include GPS, cameras, biometric sensors, and two way networks. One story from Australia describes a family that, after their German pointer wreaked havoc while they were away, ended up installing webcams and a GPS Whistle collar. The father could then keep a friendly eye on the dog from his phone. What began as a digital baby monitor for Tigger, the pointer, quickly turned into home surveillance, all in the name of pet care and peace of mind.

The pet tech market has exploded. One recent survey reports that global spending on animal wearables will reach many billions in the next few years. The largest segment is location and ID tracking, meaning GPS collars and RFID tags that promise you will never lose Rover or Kitty, but every category from fitness monitors to automated feeders is growing. Researchers even estimate that veterinary smart collars could top 3.7 billion dollars by 2026. These devices often brag about features lifted straight from human fitness culture, such as steps taken, sleep patterns, calorie burn, and heart rate. Some even stream video and dispense treats on command. Yet behind the cute app notifications sits serious data collection. A study of popular pet apps found that the vast majority loaded third party trackers before users even clicked accept. Two apps were literally broadcasting passwords in the clear. In short, every pounce and tail wag is logged somewhere.

Pet owners mostly see this as harmless. Reviews of pet wearables rarely complain about privacy, and one study found they express about 2.3 times fewer privacy concerns than reviews of people wearables. Why worry about data when the alternative is a panicked missing dog poster. Emotion beats caution. The same researchers noted that marketing plays on owners’ fear of losing a pet, so people prioritize device functionality that supports those emotional drivers over privacy concerns. In other words, worried about Fido’s fate, owners happily hand over sit by me modes and live tracking feeds while barely glancing at privacy policies. When the collars were examined, the findings were revealing. Many pet trackers do not even spell out what data they collect. One privacy audit found several activity or GPS collars had no section in their policy about collecting pet activity or location at all. Most devices actually uploaded more information about the owner than the animal. Yet owners seldom notice, and tech companies keep selling that warm feeling of We’ve got him while quietly hoovering data.

Security experts have started to sound alarms. Newcastle University computer scientists tested dozens of pet apps and found a shocking landscape. Almost every app included tracking software, and some even exposed users’ login details and locations in plain text. Even apps claiming to protect pets breached privacy norms, since 21 out of 25 were broadcasting data before a user could consent. As one researcher bluntly puts it, pet collars and cameras are a rapidly growing industry and they bring new security, privacy, and safety risks to pet owners. In practice, this means the same vulnerabilities we worry about in phone apps now live in our dog’s collar. The stakes can be high. A stolen pet tracker could reveal a family’s routines, or a hacked camera could film inside your home. Despite this, users rarely treat pet tech with the same caution as their own laptops. A survey of pet owners found many who worried an attack might happen, yet paradoxically they did far less to secure the app controlling Fido than the one on their own phone.

All of this fits into a larger picture that scholars have been mapping for years. Recall Michel Foucault’s Panopticon, a circular prison where a single guard can watch all inmates unseen, creating a state of conscious and permanent visibility. By extension, our homes and neighborhoods are becoming an animal panopticon. In the urban jungle, every corner may host a doorbell camera or a snapping smartphone. As one Atlantic columnist put it, Cities are the most potent nodes of this global animal panopticon. Street cameras, doorbell cameras, and regular people with phones are all capturing our pets on the move. Even in rural areas, conservationists long ago put GPS collars on wild animals, and now mainstream pet gadgets do the same to Fluffy. The effect is that animals may adjust their behavior under the gaze of these systems, much as Foucault described inmates internalizing the watchful eye. Arguably the dog may not know it is being observed, but in this network it is, and every outing leaves a digital trace.

Behind this sits what Shoshana Zuboff dubbed surveillance capitalism. Tech giants perfected turning personal data into profit long ago, and pet trackers are simply the new frontier. The Guardian interviewed Zuboff about how companies persuaded us to give up our privacy for convenience, creating a new economic order and an expropriation of critical human rights. Every pulse and potty break that a smart collar logs adds to that data economy. Petcare conglomerates notice too. One analysis noted Mars Petcare has poured hundreds of millions into tech startups, essentially funding an Internet of Pets. In this light, your dog’s collar is just another connected node. The companies behind Whistle, Tractive, and their ilk are not only selling peace of mind. They are also harvesting algorithms for future products or ads, from diet kibble to kids’ smart collars. In other words, what datafication started with our phones now includes our furriers. As one surveillance scholar puts it, we are moving into an era of dataveillance, meaning a constant digital monitoring of all creatures. Even zoo biologists have warned that systems built to track tigers and parrots can creep into human surveillance contexts.

The notion that pets extend our identity online is not just theoretical. Consider microchip IDs. A lost cat’s chip can be scanned by a shelter and instantly yield an owner’s name and address. Even without implants, some tech already uses pets to identify us. A recent study of service dog trainers found a telling split. Handlers were divided on whether dog activity data constitutes personal data capable of identifying them, and as one researcher dryly noted, the answer is yes. In practice, the puppy raiser volunteers willingly shared the pups’ data with their agency, but the agency worried those GPS trails could effectively serve as fingerprints for the humans. Imagine an app that recognizes your dog by her coat pattern. It is often only a click away from pointing at you. In effect, your dog’s tracker is an extension of your digital ID.

This convergence of collars and cameras is startling. Pets, once considered innocent of privacy politics, have turned into quasi agents of the surveillance age. They bring us comfort by letting us keep track of them, and in return they bring us data. The resulting picture is a little comic and a little chilling. We might chuckle at the idea of Fido smugly finishing dinner while quietly logging our schedule. Yet this is the new normal, since even our pets live inside Zuboff’s coup from above of data capitalism. In sum, the humble pet collar has morphed from a mark of ownership into a node in a global digital panopticon. The creature wearing it seems oblivious, but through it, companies and governments alike catch a glimpse of our lives. It turns out that when dogs and cats connect to the net, we all become a little more connected, whether we like it or not.