> Because prisons have no real equivalents for the private and public spaces we experience as free citizens. Drawing an equality between people who are voluntarily in a public space and people who are incarcerated is wrong, because the people in public can choose to withdraw somewhere private. The prisoner (in the panopticon model at least) has no such option.

To me this feels like an entirely different argument than the "expectation of privacy" one, and I still do not really find it persuasive. Please note that the panopticon concept was also planned to be used in schools, hospitals, and other locations.

> If the state had an interconnected surveillance system which saw both into our public and private spaces, the analogy might make more sense -- and usually when "panopticon" is used, it is used in that sense. But it's the wrong term to use for surveillance which occurs only in public.

I disagree that the term "panopticon" should not be applied to public mass surveillance systems. There are some contrasts between the two concepts, but I think it paints a pretty good picture of the psychological impact that such systems can have.

> I'm not trying to be an overly pedantic dick here, but words do need to have clear meanings. There are other terms we could use for ubiquitous surveillance that occurs in public, and perhaps we should standardise on one.

I don't really take issue with being pedantic, I'm being pedantic too. But still, metaphors are metaphors, not direct equivocations. There are indeed limitations to how much the term "panopticon" can possibly be applied to some other surveillance system. If you go further, you can also point out more literal aspects of the panopticon. However, I don't think it is an unreasonable stretch to use the term "panopticon" for other sorts of mass surveillance systems. EFF has used the term "panopticon" a fair bit to describe digital surveillance and data collection systems, even though those are also a fair bit different than the original concept of a panopticon.

To me, the important thing about an metaphor is that it conveys the right thing to people, not whether it is literally a 1:1 match. When people say that mass surveillance systems are a "panopticon", they definitely are pointing to the things that made the panopticon so unnerving:

- The uncertainty of whether or not your actions are being scrutinized, forcing you into a permanent state of paranoia and self-regulation.

- The way that it enables totalitarian control over large groups of people.

- The general loss of privacy (regardless of whether you had any expectation of it to begin with.)

To me, basically any mass surveillance system is like this, except probably worse. Mass data collection means that not only do you not have any idea if anyone's scrutinizing your actions, but you also don't know if it might be scrutinized any time in the future.

As far as standardization goes, there are write-ups on the use of the term panopticon as a metaphor. I'll just defer to Wikipedia[1] and its respective sources here. I think the fact that it is commonly used as a metaphor should cover the "standardization" aspect; some day, the actual original panopticon will probably be eclipsed by the systems that are described in relation to it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon#Surveillance_techno...