Greater Victoria has become blanketed with Closed Circuit video surveillance in the name of crime control. Statistics show however that CCTV does not protect residents from crime, and its use raises other questions. How do we protect privacy from the invasive eye of the spy camera? How does ubiquitous surveillance affect people’s mental health? “Advances in audio recording and facial recognition technology make CCTV installments extremely invasive” writes Brett Friedman in What are the Effects of Invasion of Privacy – Mental Health (fherehab.com)

The effects include symptoms of anxiety, depression and paranoia. Widespread CCTV use crept up gradually, before we collectively decided how much surveillance we wanted to be placed under.

Those are some of the psychological effects; what are the social impacts? One, says Friedman, is “eroded trust in others”, because people being watched “always have to worry about how they are perceived, making it difficult to have genuine interactions”. People watching a private interaction or conversation might misunderstand its purpose or content, he goes on. They might even lay a complaint with law enforcement. Of course, law enforcement itself stokes the invasion-of-privacy furnace with constant appeals for business and residential CCTV footage in its fight against crime. The crime of privacy invasion is downgraded.

Decreased trust in government is another consequence of mass surveillance. If officialdom doesn’t trust you, why should you trust it? If you live in an apartment complex and mistrustful spying follows you to the very door of your personal living space, where can you feel at home? How can you feel at home even in your own skin, if it’s constantly on show?

These questions should be considered by residential building managers and housing providers when they come under pressure to invest in “safety”. Friedman explains that people being watched self-censor. They alter behavior so as to seem inoffensive to the watcher that looms silently on the edge of awareness. Paranoia develops. A community full of overly anxious people is less peaceful, more volatile — the opposite of the safety which surveillance is supposed to increase.

CCTV first came into use in psychiatric wards. Now that they are becoming ubiquitous, are they turning whole neighbourhoods, apartment complexes and workplaces into wards of anxious inmates? Even in real psych wards, says the American Psychiatric Association, the effectiveness and ethics of CCTV use “needs to be reconsidered … Available evidence does not support its use as a security measure”. How then can it be supported in an ordinary residential building or workplace? Is it not placing everyone under suspicion, criminalizing them? The other places it was first introduced were prisons. Are we all now in prison then? According to the APA, in Ethical and Practical Issues in Video Surveillance of Psychiatric Units | Psychiatric Services (psychiatryonline.org) “privacy is integral to maintaining one’s self-image and sense of identity”.

What effect does being watched and monitored have on brain activity itself, asks Kayleigh Rogers: What Constant Surveillance Does to Your Brain (vice.com) “Turns out, it can be just as mentally taxing as depression and can even cause symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder.” When the managers of a CCTV-free building suddenly decide to place cameras at entrances and in hallways, some residents will feel they’ve been plunged into a petri dish. Their instinct is to flee, to move out of a home they perhaps loved and had felt comfortable in for years. Where could they move though, given the rental-vacancy situation today? They are trapped. How mentally healthy is that?

Despite the negative outcomes noted above, BC Housing states in BC Housing Design Guidelines and Construction Standards (2019) that in its buildings “main entrances to multi-tenanted buildings should be fitted with a digital access control system. Where a DAC (digital access) entrance system, concierge and CCTV system is provided, consideration should be given to extending these systems to cover the internal circulation areas.” Over 29,000 families and over 56,000 senior’s households live in BC Housing complexes. That adds up to lot of citizens forfeiting their privacy rights — and it doesn’t even include market rentals and condos.

CRD Housing takes a more nuanced approach. A manager at Capital Region Housing Corporation explains that they don’t use cameras without completing Privacy Impact Assessments and gaining approvals. “Before permission were to be granted, CRHC is required to have a policy outlining who can access footage from the cameras, when it can be accessed and if other information is captured at the same time when and if it can be used, along with how it is stored and/or deleted. As we house families and vulnerable populations. we weigh the possible benefits of camera use in relation to a situation versus the loss of privacy as part of our decision making process on a case by case basis, rather than a ‘one size fits all’ response.” (private email)

We could argue that in the present era of ubiquitous and aggressively marketed surveillance technology, everyone is “vulnerable” where privacy invasion is concerned, and that “one size fits all” should also not apply to whole neighbourhoods and streetscapes.

“A baby rat being watched by its mother will feel comforted and safe. A baby rat being watched by a predator would feel stressed and threatened,” notes psychologist Brock Chisolm, quoted by Rogers in Vice. It seems that to some residents in a given apartment or condo building a spy camera is their mother, while to others it’s the predator. So the question becomes, should some residents suffer under the predatory camera because others think surveillance means safety? We come back to the aforementioned build-up of mistrust, resentment, and loss of “genuine interaction”. Introverts certainly don’t “feel at home” in a home that’s video-monitored. They, not the suspected robbers and vandals, are the ones being spied on.

“Peeping Tom” used to be a negative figure. His story may have begun in the 11th century with the man who stole a sneak peek at Lady Godiva riding naked past his house. Peeping Tom was struck blind for spying from his window, but now we’re all naked in front of the spy camera. “Tom” used to be reviled. When did he become socially acceptable?

Most advice for avoided Peeping Tom is about avoiding him online. There are ways to increase digital privacy (not carrying a smart phone is a start, for anyone not wanting to be tailed and tracked), but how to avoid CCTV cameras? If you walk on streets or enter business premises and public places you’re fair game. You can always hide away at home, close the curtains and become a hermit, but is that healthy?

The very definition of mental illness is the feeling of being trapped in inescapable circumstances. Mental illness is discussed a lot these days, yet commentators rarely discuss how lifestyle norms like blanket video surveillance add to it. The annual Mental Health Week was instigated by the Canadian Mental Health Association in 1951, but we now have an explosion of privacy-invasion technology unheard of in 1951.

The first use of public CCTV in Canada happened in 1991 in Sherbrooke, Quebec. In only three decades, many towns have become blanketed by it. Yet researchers at Comparitech – Tech researched, compared and rated tell us “We found little correlation between the number of public CCTV cameras and crime or safety”. Apparently while the rest of us have our privacy snatched, the criminals who have “something to hide”, know how to do so.

The threat to privacy is compounded by the advance of CCTV capability into Facial Recognition Technology, which identifies an individual face by harvesting matching digital features from video captures. This new level of surveillance-creep is a human rights issue but one that, ironically, is largely “overlooked”. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has come out in opposition to FRT however, assuring us that “facial recognition widely deployed in public or publicly accessible spaces to identify individuals, poses such high potential for abuse, and creates such a serious risk to human rights, that there is no framework, either technical or legal, that could eradicate the threat”. (CCLA and Privacy International collaborate on submissions regarding facial recognition guidelines for police agencies – CCLA

What does provincial legislation say about this? The BC Civil Liberties Association at https://bccla.org/privacy-handbook/ merely says that CCTV use should “bear in mind the rights of every individual to privacy”. No one’s forced to respect those rights, however. The Information and Privacy Commissioner of BC (oipc.bc.ca) provides only “guidelines” which are not legally binding. They suggest not using cameras “where people have a heightened expectation of privacy, and not to focus them into private residences”. (How then can they be used in apartment hallways and retirement residences?) Keep the recording “only so long as necessary”, they continue, and destroy records when no longer needed. The question is, when is it necessary in the first place, in a private living space?

The BC Liberties Association suggests that residents ask landlords “would a less privacy-intrusive way of addressing the problem be effective?” Often there was no “problem” needing to be addressed, only the fear that one might turn up (i.e. “crime”). Meanwhile there is the theft of privacy, and once lost to surveillance-creep it’s hard to get that back.

Too many housing providers don’t ask about less intrusive safety methods, which leaves it up to residents to ask it themselves. We’re on our own … even when “on our own” is what we never are. Building managers, residents, neighbourhood associations, community groups and members of the public need to get vigilant together about privacy, and ask how we might regain freedom from ubiquitous surveillance.

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S. B. Julian (BA, MLS) is a free-lance writer-researcher who lives in the CRD.