Free Guy’s perspective on privacy and government is in 3 parts. The first part is on the surveillance and control in relationship to the government, the second is data privacy and the third is the manipulation of digital spaces.
This movie has in-game monitoring. The game world in Free Guy mirrors real-life conscience about digital surveillance. It’s shown a lot in the movie that the administrators who work on it have full power to observe, control, and even delete NPCs and players. This is akin to real life because it is also shown that the government has a lot of our data and uses it to manipulate our spaces, especially digitally, like how both the government and private corporations have things such as location trackers, cookies, and facial recognition. There is also the manipulation of what we can see, like how ads are all around us and how both the government and private corporations can manipulate those adds based on data that they collect on us.
Just as game developers can delete or reset Guy’s world, tech companies can suppress or remove certain content from platforms, leading to concerns about freedom of expression. In countries with authoritarian regimes, the government’s ability to manipulate online environments becomes even more extreme, where dissenting opinions are censored, and citizens are subjected to propaganda.
As the developers in Free Guy represent unchecked corporate power, there’s a clear parallel to the real-world need for government regulation of tech companies. Today, there are increasing calls for governments to regulate tech companies' ability to collect data, use surveillance technologies, and manipulate digital environments. Legislation like the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe is an attempt to address these issues, but many argue that stronger regulations are needed globally.
Free Guy also raises important ethical questions related to privacy in digital environments. In a similar fashion to governmental surveillance private cooperations also have the unchecked power of being able to collect your data. This is analogous to real-world digital surveillance, where governments and tech companies track user behavior online—often without explicit consent. Every action within the game is monitored, much like how users are tracked when they interact with websites, apps, and platforms.
Guy and the other NPCs are unaware that they are being watched and manipulated by the game's creators. This mirrors the lack of transparency in how personal data is often collected in the real world. Many users are unaware of the extent to which their information is being harvested and analyzed by companies for marketing, surveillance, or other purposes, raising concerns about the ethics of informed consent.