Sousveillance: Civic Surveillance of Surveillance Cameras
How can citizens reclaim transparency in a world increasingly shaped by networked safety and enforcement cameras? Join our ThingsCon workshop to explore the power of sousveillance—using the tools of surveillance to scrutinize the systems that watch us.
Networked safety and enforcement cameras increasingly shape urban life, yet their presence and function often remain opaque. This workshop explores how citizens can turn the tools of surveillance back onto the systems that watch them: Redirecting object recognition to identify street camera’s for civic scrutiny. Building on several camera spotting tours supported with various versions of a “mobile transparency app”, we introduce a new prototype that uses object recognition to detect street cameras and log them through a civic annotation workflow.
The workshop is for anyone interested in civic tech, democratic oversight, and human-scale alternatives to opaque “smart city” systems. Together, we explore how civic sousveillance might evolve into a deeper practice of scrutinizing—and reshaping—the technologies embedded in our streets.
More info and tickets: https://thingscon.org/events/things-2025
More info on the Human Values for Smarter Cities research project we are conducting: https://humanvaluesforsmartercities.nl/