The Dynamics of Impersonal Trust and Distrust in Surveillance Systems

Empirical research concerned with the trust that individuals may or may not have in surveillance systems has largely been gauged through opinion poll and survey type research. Although these may be useful in augmenting broad patterns of trust based attitudes, this article argues that they tend to harbour theoretically weak conceptualisations of trust which may produce misleading results. We draw on relevant concepts related to notions of ‘impersonal trust’ (for example, ‘access points’, ‘facework’ and ‘suspension’) to facilitate a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews which concerned Londoners’ trust related experiences, perceptions and understandings of living in a so called ‘surveillance society’. We form a number of preliminary conclusions which are of interest to sociological research on trust and surveillance studies: contrary to prior research on trust and surveillance, trust related positions may be neither static nor polarised, but processual and situational; the suspension of certainty bridged by impersonal trust is particularly problematic in surveillance systems as they especially lack access points; and impersonal trust related positions are likely to be considerably weak as information about the systems requires specialist information.