DIGITAL VISIBILITY AND PRIVACY IN CONTEMPORARY URBAN SPACES

Abstract

The presented research conducts a thorough epistemological analysis of the total digital visibility phenomenon in the context of the modern urban paradigm and its implications for privacy and subjective autonomy of urban residents. The relevance of this problematic is determined by the exponential acceleration of digital transformation in urban agglomerations, accompanied by the implementation of pan-continual monitoring technologies, holistic big data analytics, and integrated smart city infrastructure. These processes constitute unprecedented regimes of socio-technical control, where perceptive, locomotor, and social patterns of residents are subject to multimodal fixation through hybrid systems of sensors, video analytics, mobile interfaces, and machine learning algorithms.

Applying a multi-methodological approach, the author explicates the genesis of the "digital visibility" concept in the interdisciplinary field, tracing its semantic correlations with surveillance studies in the works of David Lyon and Zygmunt Bauman, critical analytics of surveillance capitalism in Shoshana Zuboff's research, exploration of algorithmic sovereignty in Taina Bucher's works, and urban metamorphoses in the interpretation of Rob Kitchin and Sharon Zukin. Special analytical attention is paid to the architectonics of digital surveillance in urban space, which transforms residents into "datafied citizens" deprived of epistemic sovereignty over their own data.

Through systematization of empirical and theoretical data, a triad of fundamental privacy threats in the conditions of digital urbanization is identified: algorithmic reduction of privacy, asymmetry of visibility, and formation of "behavioral surplus." Extrapolating these issues to the Ukrainian context, the author demonstrates the discrepancy between the pace of urban digitalization and the level of regulatory framework and cyber literacy of citizens. Based on a critical analysis of domestic researchers' works, the necessity of constructing a digital presence ethics as a hybrid normative matrix is argued, integrating legal mechanisms of data protection with humanistic principles of intersubjective interaction in the digital continuum.

The comparative analysis concludes with the formulation of a triad of axiological principles for digital urban studies: algorithmic transparency, the right to digital invisibility, and the development of digital literacy. The research creates new epistemological perspectives for transdisciplinary discourse at the intersection of philosophical anthropology, social theory, urban studies, and digital studies.