Mcveillance, Coveillance, and Socioveillance in the Context of Social Business

Summary

I was a victim of McVeillance in June this year. I was walking around a shopping mall under systematic surveillance – CCTV everywhere – when I was accosted by security upon taking out my own camera to photograph the mall. (FYI, the mall itself was the subject of my photography and not its customers per se.)

Professor Steve Mann coined the expression McVeillance after he was manhandled out of a McDonalds in Paris where he was eating with his family in 2012 for no other reason than for wearing a computer vision system. McDonalds was watching him. He was watching McDonalds. And ‘they’ didn’t like it.

I wasn’t ejected from the mall as I was actually undertaking a project for the mall’s owners, unbeknownst to the security personnel. I was escorted to the security office for appropriate clearance – an act which, per Mann’s definitions, officially made me a surveiller.