A quarter of a century ago, a public debate raged over CCTV cameras. Did they actually reduce crime? Would they usher in a Big Brother society? Meanwhile, some deep thinkers were looking further ahead: what would happen when this sort of technology became much smaller, cheaper and more widely available?
In his 1998 book The Transparent Society, the writer David Brin argued that the technology could not be stopped, but it could provide citizens with “flashlights of our own” to examine the powerful. A few years later, academic Steve Mann coined the term “sousveillance” (from the French word for “below”) to represent the idea that ordinary people could provide a counterbalance to growing surveillance by providing “watchful vigilance from underneath”.
Were they right? It is certainly possible to see sousveillance in action in 2025. The fact that almost everyone now has a camera phone has enabled the exposure of some acts of police brutality, for example. Data protection laws such as the EU’s GDPR have made it possible for gig workers to obtain copies of their data from platforms such as Uber, in an attempt to understand how the companies’ opaque algorithms determine their pay. A recent trend on TikTok involved young people surreptitiously recording meetings in which they were laid off by their employers.