The threat to identities posed by arbitrary surveillance

Abstract

Indiscriminate surveillance threatens our right to privacy, enables the powerful to 'sort' society into groups, and apply blanket treatment to those groups. We therefore see resistance to blanket surveillance as vital to democracy and liberty. Surveillance resistance advocates sometimes try to raise people's awareness of the technologies of surveillance to evoke feelings of threat that might motivate resistance, yet we argue for a different approach. Surveillance awareness and resistance might be better achieved by highlighting the collective consequences of surveillance - namely that individual’s might want to protect the privacy of their group, as well as their individual privacy. We present data from experimental survey studies that draw on identity and group privacy concepts from social psychology. The shift is such that instead of treating the creep and growth of surveillance technology as the threat, it is group reputation threat and interference by outgroups that people will find threatening.