sousveillance

A goal of sousveillance is to bring back that sense of small town community, in contrast to profiling and surveillance. Sousveillance (cyborglogging, etc.) tends to be distributed and less organized, or at least less hierarchical, and thus conducive to a small community in which individuals trust one another. Surveillance, on the other hand, as with profiling, often operates in secret, in the context of larger peer-anonymous communities, thus breeding mistrust, which itself breeds more surveillance, as a vicious cycle. Not to forget, of course, the lack of inverse visibility that can lead to corruption of politicians who use secrecy to hide theft of public monies, and the like, in a surveillance-only society.

Understanding inequiveillance requires us to understand and appreciate that notions of secrecy are very different from notions of privacy, and that if we are to give up privacy, then we must and should also give up secrecy. Conversely as long as secrecy exists, so too should privacy.

http://wearcam.org/anonequity.htm