This talk reports on a pilot study of Filipino migrant domestic workers experiences of surveillance in Hong Kong. Respondents in the study were invited to use smartphones to record their daily experiences of surveillance over the course of a one week period, followed by interviews about their diaries and focus group discussion about their experiences of surveillance. The pilot study raised a number of issues that foreground the entangled nature of care and control and of forms of visibility and invisibility in surveillance practices that impinge especially on migrant domestic workers. It also raised a number of ethical dilemmas about the research process itself.

Employer and state use of digital surveillance to monitor and control domestic work is justified frequently on the basis of needing to ensure the care and preserve the security of children. Our ethnographic in(ve)stigation of domestic workers’ forms of digital recording is likewise justified in part on the grounds that the state largely ignores or fails to adequately look out for and make visible forms of control and coercion. Domestic workers embraced the use of smartphone diaries to record and document forms of both legal and illegal surveillance practices they routinely encounter such as the use of hidden web cams. However, they also used the diaries to disclose and make visible their daily practices of care, forms of self and peer-monitoring as well as strategies used to manage if not control employers and persons cared for.