Sousveillance: Communities of resistance to the surveillance environment

Facebook is often invoked in popular discourse as a device for the potential exploitation of individual privacy. Facebook users invite surveillance, and personal information revealed by Facebook users is compiled into aggregated databases of linked information, preferences, and behaviors. In the interest of the ideals of individual empowerment, cultural integrity, social responsibility and equality, social networking communities are forming to interrogate networked surveillance. This article examines those communities of resistance in the form of “sousveillance” tactics that have emerged as a backlash to the surveilled environment. Sousveillance is “watching from below,” a form of inverse surveillance in which people monitor the surveillors. Examples include citizen video, watchdog web sites, or the monitoring of authorities (corporations, military, government). Sousveillance embraces the idea of transparency as an antidote to concentrated power in the hands of surveillors. Sousveillance is used in Facebook itself to expose the data gathered by Facebook to the larger networked population. The surveillance sector’s responses to citizen resistance may ultimately alter the power dynamic between the watchers and the watched. Implications for this power dynamic are discussed through an exploration of Facebook sousveillance communities of resistance and how they are sustained in an effort to contribute to the larger examination of hegemonic practices in the global information society.