ABSTRACT
Video surveillance of public spaces is a feature of modern societies that has expanded rapidly during the last decades. This chapter concerns the expansion of video surveillance in Sweden and the comparatively weak opposition to this activity. In some national contexts, for example, Germany (Hempel and Töpfer 2004), video surveillance has been quite contested, both by the public and by privacy protection commissioners. In Sweden, however, concern for video surveillance as violation of privacy has been rather limited. Public video surveillance continues to expand without causing much contestation. In this chapter, it is suggested that the weak attention to privacy has its roots in a utilitarian approach both to this notion and to monitoring as such. Thus, in general terms, the study illustrates the rationale behind this kind of approach to video surveillance.
