A Republican and Collective Approach to the Privacy and Surveillance Issues of Bodycams: A commentary

Body-worn cameras are quickly becoming ubiquitous in public spaces around the world. Whether worn by officers of the law or personnel of a local car parking authority, they present a unique form of surveillance which challenges privacy in public. Governments and other organizations are adopting laws, internal rules, and operational guidelines in a scramble to catch up with the rapid spread of the technology. This fragmented approach to policymaking has so far not provided a panacea to the surrounding privacy issues. In this contribution, we will apply the relatively underexplored theoretical angle of republican political theory and its focus on non-domination to this problem. We argue that taking a republican approach to the value of privacy might be a first step towards addressing some of the concerns raised by the chapters. We focus on two aspects of republican theory: the arbitrariness of interferences, and the closely related notion of freedom as non-domination rather than non-interference. The potential usefulness of the concept of collective privacy in this regard will also be discussed. First, however, we will summarize the preceding chapters which inform this analysis.