Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: What's Acceptable (and What's Not) in Neighborhood Video Surveillance

The popularization of video security devices promises to improve security in and outside people's home, yet they also expose their owners, neighbors and visitors to privacy risks. Most studies have focused on the primary users’ privacy, yet we know the implications of such technology span far beyond the individual into the wider neighborhood. Utilizing a combinatorial matrix survey, guided by Contextual Integrity Theory, we explore how people manage privacy in relation to these devices within the context of their own neighborhood. We demonstrate that in this neighborhood context, privacy management is socially situated, shaped primarily by transmission principles (e.g., whether footage is shared for security or gossip purposes), and nuanced by social factors related to the individual (e.g., social class), and their neighborhood (e.g., closeness to the neighborhood community). We highlight that privacy norms are not stable individual constructs but emergent, context-dependent, and collectively managed concepts, thereby contributing to work on Contextual Integrity Theory by applying it to a group-level context—neighborhoods. This work has several implications for product design and policy that prioritizes privacy beyond the individual.