The Archivist’s Dilemma: Ethical Approaches to Surveillance

Archives have long been viewed as bastions of memory, preservation, and historical accountability. However, archivists must confront ethical questions in an era of digital surveillance, data harvesting, and global information flows

What responsibilities do archivists have in a world where state and corporate surveillance can infringe upon civil liberties? How should institutions ethically collect, describe, and provide access to sensitive personal data materials

These questions bring archival ethics and surveillance into sharp relief, revealing the moral weight of decisions to process, preserve, and grant information access. 

Ethics as Archival Practice

Archival decisions have ethical implications, from determining what is worth preserving to how records are described and accessed. Archivists operate between information stewardship and public accountability, often navigating conflicting expectations of transparency, privacy, ownership, and access. 

Traditionally, archival ethics have emphasized neutrality, provenance, and respect for the integrity of records. However, contemporary realities challenge these values. As institutions digitize records and expand online access, new questions arise: Who controls the data? Who is represented—or misrepresented? Who might be harmed?  

The Archivist’s Dilemma: Surveillance and Civil Liberties

The rise of surveillance technologies has heightened these concerns. Governments and corporations often amass vast quantities of data via emails, biometric information, and social media activity with little oversight. While some of this information may eventually find its way into archives, archivists must ask: should it? 

Surveillance records, such as those from intelligence agencies or police departments, are deeply problematic. They may contain unverified accusations, racial or political profiling, or data collected without consent. Preserving such records can be vital for accountability and historical recordkeeping, especially when they expose abuses of power. However, they also risk retraumatizing individuals, reinforcing stigma, or compromising privacy. 

Archivists must therefore balance the value of transparency with the right to be forgotten. This approach becomes especially urgent when dealing with materials documenting marginalized communities disproportionately targeted by surveillance regimes. 

Consent, Context, and Harm Reduction

One key ethical principle in addressing surveillance-related materials is informed consent. Traditional archives often lacked the ability—or interest—to obtain consent from individuals whose lives were documented in their holdings. Today, archivists are revisiting these legacies by engaging with communities to determine how sensitive materials should be preserved and shared. 

For example, contemporary community archives may withhold certain records from public access or use redaction to minimize harm. Others may include content warnings or contextual framing to help users understand the circumstances under which records were created. Archivists are also increasingly adopting harm-reduction frameworks from social work and public health to guide decisions about access, digitization, and outreach. 

Ethical description practices are equally critical. Surveillance records often reflect the biases of the systems that created them. Archivists must recognize and counteract these biases in metadata, cataloging, and finding aids. Descriptions that uncritically reproduce the language of law enforcement or intelligence agencies can perpetuate injustice rather than illuminate it. 

Digital Infrastructure and Data Responsibility

Surveillance is no longer confined to state agencies. Social media platforms, data brokers, and wearable tech generate enormous amounts of personal data, often stored in cloud-based systems. As archives expand to include born-digital materials, archivists must consider how their systems could inadvertently enable surveillance. 

Questions to consider include:

• Who has access to archival servers?
• Do third-party vendors host records with opaque terms of service?
• Could web analytics be used to track users who are researching sensitive topics?

Even well-intentioned archives can become complicit in surveillance if their digital infrastructure is insecure or overly porous. For digital or digitized records, ethical archival stewardship means questioning how metadata, user logs, and data traces are managed. It requires thinking about encryption, access controls, and the long-term preservation of privacy alongside the long-term preservation of records. 

Reimagining Accountability

Archival ethics in the age of surveillance demand a shift from presumed neutrality to active accountability. Archivists must be moral agents who recognize the impact of their decisions on real people, which includes being transparent about institutional policies, being willing to reappraise past practices, and advocating for ethical data collection and retention approaches. 

Contemporary archival ethics are no longer about what to keep, but how to care, whom to protect, and whose stories they are telling. As surveillance technologies evolve, so must archival practices be grounded in a commitment to justice, dignity, and the public good.