What's In It For Us? Benevolence, National Security, and Digital Surveillance

• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Author: Sara Degli Esposti,Kirstie Ball,Sally Dibb
• Date: 01 September 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13362

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited,

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Abstract: This article challenges suggestions that citizens should accept digital surveillance technologies (DSTs)

and trade their privacy for better security. Drawing on data from nine EU countries, this research shows that

citizens’ support for DSTs varies not only depending on the way their data are used but also depending on their

views of the security agency operating them. Using an institutional trustworthiness lens, this research investigates

three DST cases—smart CCTV, smartphone location tracking, and deep packet inspection—that present escalating

degrees of privacy risk to citizens. The findings show that the perceived benevolence of security agencies is essential

to acceptability in all three cases. For DSTs with greater privacy risk, questions of competence and integrity enter

citizens’ assessments.

Evidence for Practice

• Citizens are not necessarily willing to trade privacy for security, as is often assumed.

• For citizens to accept digital surveillance technologies, these technologies must be deployed in ways that

reflect benevolence and incorporate community interests.

• For citizens to accept more intrusive digital surveillance technologies, security agencies need to demonstrate

integrity and their ability to deliver security benefits.

• Participatory democratic processes can establish the shared values that underpin the use of digital surveillance

for security purposes.

Digital Surveillance Technologies (DSTs) are

widely used by security agencies1 in Europe

and in the United States to fight crime

and terror (Bigo 2016). National governments have

often justified digital surveillance to the public on

the basis that it is reasonable to trade individual

privacy for better national security, dismissing those

who oppose DST use as having “something to hide”

(Solove 2011). This article challenges this assumption

using an institutional trustworthiness lens. It shows

that citizens’ evaluations of DSTs vary not only

depending on how the DST uses their data but also

depending on their views of the security agency itself.

Following recent data breach scandals, public

concerns about how security agencies generate and

use citizens’ data suggest that an investigation of this

issue is overdue. This article places data use at the

heart of its research design, using the concept of data

vulnerability to distinguish three DST cases: smart

CCTV (sCCTV), smartphone location tracking

(SLT), and deep packet inspection (DPI). Data

vulnerability refers to the extent to which citizens

believe that they will experience harms from how the

data generated by DSTs are used (Martin, Borah, and

Palmatier 2017). Each of the DSTs examined presents

different levels of data vulnerability.

This article finds that the three institutional

trustworthiness subscales—benevolence, competence,

and integrity—influence the extent to which citizens

support or oppose different DSTs, according to the data

vulnerabilities they generate. The perceived benevolence

of security agencies is essential to citizen perceptions

of DST support in all three cases. For the DSTs that

provoke greater data vulnerability (i.e., SLT and DPI),

questions of competence and integrity enter citizens’

assessments. Those who oppose their adoption are

particularly concerned about security agencies’ integrity

(West and Bowman 2016). Quantile regression is used

to examine the relationship between the trustworthiness

subscales and citizens’ perceptions of these DSTs, as it

helps unpack the differing views of those who support

and those who oppose the technologies. Thus, the study

contributes to earlier research examining citizen support

for such intrusive technologies (Bromberg, Charbonneau,

and Smith 2018) and the related ethical issues.

In addition to these theoretical contributions,

the study makes two important methodological

What’s In It For Us? Benevolence, National Security, and

Digital Surveillance

Sara Degli Esposti

Kirstie Ball

Sally Dibb

Sally Dibb is a Professor of Marketing

in the

Centre for Business in Society

at

Coventry University. Her research explores

the role of data in addressing societal

and business challenges and has been

supported by a range of UK and European

funding streams. Sally is a visiting Professor

at The Open University and the University of

St Andrews. She has served twice as a panel

member for the United Kingdom Research

Excellence Framework.

Email: sally.dibb@coventry.ac.uk

Kirstie Ball is a Professor in Management

at the University of St Andrews. She is

co-director and founder of CRISP, the

Centre

for Research into Information, Surveillance

and Privacy

, a joint research center

between St Andrews, Edinburgh, Stirling

and Essex Universities. She is also Research

Fellow at the

Surveillance Studies Centre

,

Queen’s University, Canada and Visiting

Professor at the

Centre for Business in

Society

at Coventry University. Her research

specialisms are surveillance, privacy, and

employee monitoring.

Email: kirstie.ball@st-andrews.ac.uk

Sara Degli Esposti is a Research Fellow

in the

Institute of Public Goods and Policies

(IPP), part of the Spanish National Research

Council (CSIC), Honorary Research Fellow in

the

Centre for Business in Society

, Coventry

University. and teaches Applied Statistics

to law enforcement agents in the Security

Degree of Nebrija University. She has both

academic and professional experience in the

field of information privacy, cybersecurity,

and digital technology acceptance and is

currently the Research Director of H2020

project TRESCA (no. 872855).

Email: sara.degli.esposti@csic.es

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 81, Iss. 5, pp. 862–873. © 2021 The Authors.

Public Administration Review published

by Wiley Periodicals LLC. on behalf of The

American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13362.

Research Article

University of St Andrews

Coventry University

Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)