Big data

Big data & surveillance

File
The Editors
21/06/2018

We live in a world of big data. We enjoy it everyday, when we Google for something, when we use social media or when we navigate using the app on our smartphone. It would be hard to imagine a world without Big data. But big data also come with disciplining practices, control and surveillance.

 

Five years after the Snowden revelations

Column
Piia Varis
12/06/2018
8 minutes to read

Five years after the Snowden revelations, we're still more concerned with technological solutionism and individualistic models of privacy than addressing privacy as a common good.

GDPR

We're all data subjects now: the citizen in the European GDPR

Column
Jan Blommaert
21/05/2018
7 minutes to read

The new European GDPR generalizes the notion of the "data subject". But what exactly is the data subject? And how does it fit into a regulation which is fundamentally about the trading of Big Data?

Google and Big Data: Are we heading towards a dystopian reality?

Article
Lennart Driessen
01/04/2018
2 minutes to read

The services that are provided by data-giant Google are becoming more and more a normal part of daily life. But are we truly aware of the implications this has on our privacy? How much information does Google actually have on you? 

Should big data determine who gets pulled over?

Column
Paul Mutsaers
05/09/2017
4 minutes to read

Predictive policing  is often claimed to be a technical matter superior to traditional policing, with all its human flaws. I argue for a cultural approach to predictive policing, centered on the cultural shaping of police technologies. 

Transgender surveillance and violence on (social) media: Dandara’s story

Article
Jenny-Louise Van Der Aa
04/04/2017
3 minutes to read

Trans* identities have gained popular attention in a time when violence against this population has escalated. This surveillance of trans* bodies is in stark contrast with a self-proclaimed trans* revolution in mainstream media. 

Asylum Seekers Online

Google, truths and asylum procedures

Article
Max Spotti
29/12/2016
7 minutes to read

Information provided by web resources has become indispensable to immigration officers assessing asylum claims. How does the internet affect the lives of those who seek asylum by making their identity proofs unconvincing?

Information Precarity and Surveillance

Article
Sukran Ceren Salali
29/04/2016
6 minutes to read

In this essay, it is discussed how social media are used as a way for asylum seekers to find the safest routes for leaving their home country as well as how they, as social media users, are exploited by control mechanisms.

The failure of surveillance

Article
Jan Blommaert
21/01/2016
3 minutes to read

The search for terrorists is supported by highly sophisticated and intensive surveillance of electronic communication media, but overlooks the basic fact that sometimes people switch off their devices and become invisible.