Surveillance erodes interpersonal trust by removing the right to act without it

Evidence

This is the space, as Rössler puts it, in which “processes of self-description, self-definition, self-discovery, or indeed self-invention” take place, all of them “dependent upon a person bringing herself face-to-face with herself in conditions in which she can really be sure that she is protected from the eyes of anyone else.” The liberal philosopher Charles Fried had anticipated the problem when in 1970, with what would now be a primitive surveillance technology in mind, he imagined a parolee kept under constant and total monitoring in case he commits another crime; is this, he asks, consistent with any notion of freedom? Fried argues no, because such an arrangement overrides the basic element of interpersonal trust fundamental to human life: trust that respects the independence of the other person, as an other person, to make his own errors. If trust, he argues, were just a matter of risk management, we would probably delegate it to “cheap and efficient surveillance,” but “man can’t know he is trusted unless he has a right to act without surveillance” and so prove he is worthy of trust. … This is exactly the sort of trust-less social order toward which data colonialism is taking us. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 503

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the surveillance school’s claim that constant monitoring degrades trust and autonomy; echoes the ‘Three Patterns of Surveillance’ notes on monitoring undermining freedom. — connects to: Privacy matters beyond secrecy because surveillance of legal acts chills free expression — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 619; Surveillance harms by invading the self’s space on another’s behalf. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 471; Surveillance capitalism treats social trust as unnecessary friction to be eliminated — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1058 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: Fried’s 1970 parolee thought experiment is a tight counterfactual worth chasing in full — does ‘worthiness of trust’ require the radical freedom to err, and does any partial-surveillance regime preserve it?

Broader Connections

• Surveillance capitalism replaces human relationships with machine processes to achieve certainty over trust. #expands (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1115
• Surveillance capitalism treats social trust as unnecessary friction to be eliminated #qualifies (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1058