Trust and surveillance

How can we understand the relationship between trust and surveillance? This chapter reconsiders empirical findings that indicate a positive correlation between trust in public institutions and acceptance of surveillance, contrasting these findings to studies that claim that surveillance is destructive of trust. To resolve these contradictory views, this chapter discusses institutional and sociocultural theories of trust to shed light on the trust–surveillance nexus and argues that a sociocultural perspective opens space for considering how social changes may affect the trust–surveillance relationship.