Oscar H. Gandy

The Panoptic Sort was published in 1993. Its focus was on privacy and surveillance. But unlike the majority of publications addressing these topics in the United States at the time that were focused on the privacy concerns of individuals, especially those related to threats associated with government surveillance, that book sought to direct the public toward the activities of commercial firms.

The application of probability and statistics to an ever-widening number of life-decisions serves to reproduce, reinforce, and widen disparities in the quality of life that different groups of people can enjoy. As a critical technology assessment, the ways in which bad luck early in life increase the probability that hardship and loss will accumulate across the life course are illustrated. Analysis shows the ways in which individual decisions, informed by statistical models, shape the opportunities people face in both market and non-market environments.