"...Social sorting is primarily what today's surveillance achieves" (Bauman and Lyon, 2013, p. 13).
...the social sorting achieved by contemporary consumer surveillance constructs a world of "cumulative disadvantage" (Bauman and Lyon, 2013, p. 14). It is key to producing social divisions and identities (p. 121).
Bauman & Lyon (2013) cite Gandy who states, "The statistical discrimination enabled by sophisticated analytics contributes to the cumulative disadvantage that weighs down, isolates, excludes, and ultimately widens the gaps between those at the top, and nearly everyone else (p. 123).
According to Staples (2000), in postmodern life, instead of an older model of control in which we lock up deviants, there is a push to control “deviants” without first locking them up through things like community corrections, regulatory welfare and other social services (p.6). But not only are “deviants” under the gaze of control, and innocent until proven guilty is seemingly a cliché. Data generated through surveillance produces “types” that are at “risk” for behavior. This moves punishment from the individual deviant to the overall “type” (p. 6).
Lyon (2009) explains that social sorting is "a large-scale and far-reaching trend, enable in the fine-grain form by the use of searchable databases and associated techniques such as data mining, characterized by the classifying and profiling of groups in order to provide different levels of treatment, conditions or service to groups that have thus been distinguished from one another" (p. 41).
References:
Bauman, Z. & Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid surveillance. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lyon, D. (2009). Identifying citizens: ID cards as surveillance. Malden: Polity.
Staples, W. G. (2000). Everyday surveillance: Vigilance and visibility in postmodern life. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.