Surveillance potential: Exploring how unbanked social assistance recipients in Toronto, Canada negotiated a mandatory transition from cash to cards
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores how purportedly benign technologies, such as benefits cards used to distribute welfare funds, can be perceived as a tool for surveillance and social control, particularly in contexts that users experience as punitive. In many countries, poverty governance positions welfare recipients, particularly women of colour, as irresponsible consumers in need of counselling and discipline. As a result, recipients are often subjected to government efforts to constrain and monitor how they spend their money. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in Toronto, Canada, this article examines how unbanked welfare recipients navigated the mandatory transition from cheques to benefits cards. Respondents discussed the benefits cards in terms of surveillance potential, a concept that captures their uncertainty about how surveillance was operating. They viewed the cards as an extension of their relationship with caseworkers, which they characterized as adversarial. Respondents were careful about how they used the cards, engaging in everyday resistance that involved curating their financial data to portray a ‘deserving’ welfare recipient. This study demonstrates that in the era of surveillance capitalism, new technologies can have a disciplining effect on marginalized populations, even if that is not the intended function.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".