IELTS Writing Task 2 — Privacy and Surveillance: a Band 9 sample answer

The average city dweller is filmed dozens of times a day, and their phone reports their location more often still. Whether this watching makes us safer or merely smaller is one of the defining arguments of the digital age, and both sides deserve a fair hearing.

The security case is practical and persuasive. Cameras deter opportunistic crime, identify offenders after the fact, and reassure the public in spaces — stations, car parks, night-time streets — where fear itself is a burden. Digital monitoring serves similar ends: employers use it to protect equipment and data, and parents to keep children from the darker corners of the internet. For supporters, the question answers itself: the innocent, they say, have nothing to hide.

The privacy case is less about today than about the slope. Surveillance built for safety rarely stays in its lane: cameras installed against shoplifting end up tracking employees' breaks, and data gathered for convenience can be sold, leaked or demanded by authorities. There is also a subtler harm. People who know they are watched behave differently — they take fewer risks, voice fewer dissenting opinions — and a society of the permanently observed may be safe and strangely airless.

My own view is that surveillance is a tool, and tools are judged by their limits. Cameras in public spaces, governed by clear rules on who may watch and for how long footage is kept, buy safety at an acceptable price. Monitoring that is secret, permanent or purposeless is where the line lies. We should not ask whether to be watched, but who watches the watchers.