Making Surveillance Public

‘In Making Surveillance Public law and philosophy scholar Marc Schuilenburg delivers a cogent, crisp, and convincing book on the challenges brought by AI and big data applications with respect to crime control and security. In contrast to governments reined in by law and ethics, the role of Google, Microsoft and Apple in crime and disorder prevention and detection is largely invisible. Schuilenburg documents the history, identifies the challenges, suggests useful concepts (“data donation”, “algorithmic psychopower”) and offers empirical examples such as Waze. Most importantly, he suggests how to think about the kinds of solutions needed in a radically changing control environment. The book is a valuable contribution to understanding the social embeddedness and consequences of seemingly “neutral” tools and the need for research and policy, in particular as this applies to private sector technology giants not traditionally seen as salient for crime control. The book is accessible to the general reader, but should be of particular interest to criminology, a field that has neglected the topic at its peril’
Gary T. Marx, MIT author of Undercover: Police Surveillance in America and Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology

‘Making Surveillance Public provides a crucial discussion of surveillance as an exercise of power and powerfully charts a path forward for examining the digitalisation and algorithmisation of surveillance and its effect on criminology’
Chris Gilliard is a writer, professor and speaker. His work has been featured in Vice, Wired, Real Life Magazine, and The Atlantic‌‎

What are the new questions raised by AI for the prevention and detection of crime? How can we rationalise the Amazon Ring doorbell and Tesla’s Sentry Mode? How can algoracism be identified, and what should we think of data donation?

Surveillance today cannot be understood without an awareness of how AI and algorithms have become increasingly central in the governance of security. They have led to a substantial expansion in the depth and breadth of surveillance, ranging from mass data collection to mass invasion of privacy. In Making Surveillance Public, Marc Schuilenburg explores the deployment of AI applications, asking who is using them, what their aims are, what outcomes and societal impacts they lead to, and against whom they are used. To this end, he makes a case for a digital criminology centred on sociological questions of power, knowledge and AI experiences.

Marc Schuilenburg is a Professor of Digital Surveillance at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Schuilenburg’s other works available in English include Hysteria, The Securitization of Society and Mediapolis.