Equiveillance
Equiveillance is the balance between surveillance and sousveillance. It is sometimes confused with transparency. This balance (equilibrium) allows the individual to construct their own case from evidence they gather themselves, rather than merely having access to surveillance data that could possibly incriminate them.
Sousveillance, in addition to transparency, can be used to preserve the contextual integrity of surveillance data. For example, a lifelong capture of personal experience could provide "best evidence" over external surveillance data, to prevent the surveillance-only data from being taken out of context.
Equiveillance and ubiquitous computing
Equiveillance also represents a situation where all parties of a society or
economy are empowered to be able to use the tools of accountability to make beneficial decisions. Humanity has always sought to establish authority relationships: the increasing trend to record information from our environment, and of ourselves creates the need to delineate the relationships between privacy, surveillance, and sousveillance.
The emphasis on ubiquitous computing is to be contrasted with wearable computing. As our personal cell phones store more information, and have the capacity to file share, wearable and mobile computing will make manifest the ability for an individual, or small group of individuals to surveillance larger institutional systems towards developing systems of transparency and accountability. For just as large institutions, such as a government, or corporations store information about our buying habits through an integrated surveillance highway that has a ubiquitous computing infrastructure, individuals can act as consumer activists though a system of inverse surveillance that is based upon a wearable computing infrastructure that assists in maximizing personal privacy and alerting one of information being recorded about the self. Such actions could lead to a equiveillant state as power and respect are shared.
Panoptic origins of surveillance, as described by [Foucault (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault)], is originally in the context of a prison in which prisoners were isolated from each other but visible at all times by guards. Surveillance tends to isolate individuals from one another while setting forth a one-way visibility to authority figures. This isolation leads to social fragmentation.
Sousveillance has a Community-based origin, e.g. a personal electronic diary (or weblog), made public on the World Wide Web. Sousveillance tends to bring together individuals, e.g. it tends to make a large city function more like a small town, with the pitfalls of gossip, but also the benefits of a sense of community participation. There is a greater degree of responsibility that a Sousveillance environment entails.
When combined with computers, we get ubiquitous computing ("ubiqcomp") or pervasive computing ("pervcomp"). Ubiq./perv. comp. tend to rely on cooperation of the infrastructure in the environments around us, but also have a tendency to centralization of information, and hence, centralization of authority. It also creates segregation, and borders to social rights such as education, and healthcare. Individuals are sorted, and classified within an ubiquitous computing environment, leading to a new form of e-segregation. Ubiquitous computing also places emphasis on copyright law and undermines creative environments due to the authority's tendency to control.
When combined with computers, we get wearable computing ("wearcomp"). Wearcomp usually doesn't require the cooperation of any infrastructure in the environments around us. With sousveillant-computing, it is possible for the locus of control to be more distributed.
A free society is one which places emphasis on respect and balance of power: with an democratic society, respect and power are shared and well distributed, whereas in a despotic community, respect and power are not shared and constricted to the few. Increasingly, our society is confronted with the realization of an ubiquitous computing environment, with the infrastructure predicated upon sensor and surveillance systems to function despite efforts to stop such expansions. How we participate in sharing respect and power will converge with how our society conducts surveillances of its citizens, and how citizens conduct sousveillance. Equiveillance represents a harmonious balance that maximizes human freedom, individual rights as well as communal democracy. The field of personal cybernetics will converge with the field of personal imaging, and glogging (CyborgLogging), as individuals store and archive information for personal use and be used as a form of self defense.
So to have a society within which personal freedoms, and justice is equally
distributed, transparency is needed. Transparency increasingly will require
dealing with the issues of ubiquitous computing and wearable computing, and
balance between surveillance and inverse surveillance while maximizing
personal privacy.
Equiveillance table
Equiveillance establishes a social balance between surveillance and sousveillance, as outlined in a general series of comparisons that is known in the published literature as the "equiveillance table" (see for example, Proceedings of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)'s Multimedia (MM) 2004, page 620-627 (http://www.eyetap.org/papers/docs/acmmm2004sousveillance_p620-mann/). There are two kinds of situations that occur when this social balance does not exist: (1) inequiveillance, in which there is a one-sided nature to surveillance (this is the most common situation), and disequiveillance, which is when the balance is not provably one-sided, but, rather, is unequal but not clearly in one or the other direction.
Equiveillance represents a balance of the power relationships that
surveillance and sousveillance touch upon. When there is an
imbalance, social consequences can range from loss of privacy, to social
reactions that in the aggregate lead to unrest and political
instability. The idea of disequiveillance is described by Paul Virilio
in his treatise on Dromology and the possibility of freedom loss as an
accident of our modern world and how it relates to terrorism and war. In
this context, the lack of equiveillance (disequiveillance)
refers to the anthropological consequences of a world filled with
continuous recording devices that encourage a despotic form of government.
The evolving field of sousveillance, stems in part from recent research on the topic of surveillance and inverse-surveillance, shedding light on how media technology is changing our sense of privacy and human freedom. Privacy becomes
increasingly a measure of freedom and its control central to personal
autonomy.
Increasingly, remembering is influenced by both personal and public search
engines, as computing is becoming increasingly dependent upon the
human-computer interaction. The issue of being able to control the
amount of personal information that escapes and is recorded in the many
machines that make up evolving ubiquitous computing world stresses the
importance of equiveillance. The impact of surveillance will be increasingly related to the impact of increasing computer storage space and data mining
processing speed.
References
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