Rather than focusing on how surveillance shapes power relations, this study highlights that individuals’ perceptions of surveillance technology and their daily usage are more crucial. Based on a qualitative case study of Village B in Sichuan, this study takes social practices of rural household surveillance as an entry point to explore how the usage of household surveillance cameras, as a mediator, influences rural trust patterns. Findings indicate that the social practices of household surveillance reflect trust problems within acquaintance, semi-acquaintance, and stranger relationships. As a strategy to alleviate these problems, the usage of surveillance cameras hasn’t fundamentally restructured rural trust; instead, it integrates into existing orders, playing a limited regulatory role. Villagers’ situational trust in technology, manifested in the fact that they use technology to fill trust gaps while abiding by relational ethics to avoid disrupting rural social order, eventually leads to the formation of a new trust pattern combining technological rationality and rural particularities. This study provides empirical insights for understanding the dynamic operational mechanisms of rural social life in the process of digitalization and for improving the effectiveness of rural governance.