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The introduction to this special issue suggests we need to develop ‘a greater understanding of what might be thought of as the social power of algorithms'. In this paper, ‘social power’ will be critically scrutinised through a study of the entanglement of algorithmic rules with contemporary video-based surveillance technologies. The paper will begin with an analysis of algorithmic ‘IF … THEN’ rules and the conditions (IF) and consequences (THEN) that need to be accomplished for an algorithm to be said to succeed. The work of achieving conditions and consequences demonstrates that the form of ‘power’ in focus is not solely attributable to the algorithm as such, but operates through distributed agency and can be noted as a network effect. That is, the conditions and consequences of algorithmic rules only come into being through the careful plaiting of relatively unstable associations of people, things, processes, documents and resources. From this we can say that power is not primarily social in the sense that algorithms alone create an impact on society, but social in the sense of power being derived through algorithmic associations. The paper argues that this kind of power is most clearly visible in moments of breakdown, failure or other forms of trouble, whereby algorithmic conditions and consequences are not met and the careful plaiting of associations has to be brought to the fore and examined. It is through such examinations that the associational dependencies more than the social power of algorithms are made apparent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Technologies change users' existing social, cultural, and material practices by providing new opportunities for reflecting on and managing their lives. As technological advancements pervade our private and professional lives, users are tempted to see them as 'magic bullets' that can help them become more organized and efficient. In this paper, we introduce the term 'time hacking' to capture the various ways technologies mediate users' time perception and perspective. We will use the examples of virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa and the Quantified Self Movement to illustrate how people feel that they are capable of hacking time by using devices and programs. Imagining tools as neutral entities that help them better manage their lives in a world that seems increasingly sped up, users are often blind to the multifarious ways these technologies, and the companies that produce them, shape what they attend to and how they make sense of information. The concept of time hacking helps us examine what narratives users construct and share about timesaving tools and how users' perception of and perspective about time changes in response to emerging technologies. Most importantly, time hacking can help to explain the allure of timesaving technologies, why users might be enthusiastic about taking them up and integrating them into their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media is increasingly used to share information about political issues and coordinate political activism. This paper examines privacy as governance in online knowledge sharing and organizing within the Day Without Immigrants, March for Science, and Women's March movements. Structured by the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework, the study illustrates how rules-in-use creatively support appropriate information flows and govern information resources to balance community objectives and privacy. Interviews, contextualized by participant surveys and Facebook data, illustrate: the importance of (1) polycentric governance and (2) private decision-making in public Facebook groups used by activists, and (3) privacy protecting institutions governing common knowledge resources shared within and across movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how personal data protections figure into the design process of wearable technology. The data question is becoming especially important in the face of recent innovations in biotechnology that capitalize on the new fungibility of biology and electronics, in which new biotech wearables capitalize on the ability to analyze and track changes in blood, sweat, and tears. Interviews and participant observation with wearable tech designers, data scientists, fashion tech entrepreneurs, and select experts in cybersecurity and intellectual property law, reveal a range of approaches to data protection in design within the culture where wearables are beginning to merge with biotech. While a few respondents were extremely vigilant about protecting consumer’s privacy, the majority felt that when consumers ‘opt in’ to data sharing, they should be cognizant of the risks. From their perspective, it is not necessarily the producer’s responsibility to protect user's personal data. These attitudes present a problematic logic, which leaves users vulnerable to data exploitation. The paper concludes by arguing that this laissez-faire culture is the environment in which wearable biotech is being developed and will be deployed. This emerging technology raises issues about bodies, data, and ownership in crucial need of analysis and critique to push its move into the mainstream toward more equitable and inclusive ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on regulatory governance scholarship to argue that the analytic phenomenon currently known as ‘Big Data’ can be understood as a mode of ‘design-based’ regulation. Although Big Data decision-making technologies can take the form of automated decision-making systems, this paper focuses on algorithmic decision-guidance techniques. By highlighting correlations between data items that would not otherwise be observable, these techniques are being used to shape the informational choice context in which individual decision-making occurs, with the aim of channelling attention and decision-making in directions preferred by the ‘choice architect’. By relying upon the use of ‘nudge’ – a particular form of choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives, these techniques constitute a ‘soft’ form of design-based control. But, unlike the static Nudges popularised by Thaler and Sunstein [(2008).Nudge. London: Penguin Books] such as placing the salad in front of the lasagne to encourage healthy eating, Big Data analytic nudges are extremely powerful and potent due to their networked, continuously updated, dynamic and pervasive nature (hence ‘hypernudge’). I adopt a liberal, rights-based critique of these techniques, contrasting liberal theoretical accounts with selective insights from science and technology studies (STS) and surveillance studies on the other. I argue that concerns about the legitimacy of these techniques are not satisfactorily resolved through reliance on individual notice and consent, touching upon the troubling implications for democracy and human flourishing if Big Data analytic techniques driven by commercial self-interest continue their onward march unchecked by effective and legitimate constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although most surveillance studies scholars assume privacy is antithetical to surveillance, critics have recently warned that privacy-based criticisms may facilitate surveillance. That being said, we do not yet have data that show whether privacy claims were used in the past to legitimate government surveillance. This paper addresses that gap by analyzing claims made over one of the U.S.’s most controversial surveillance issues: government control over encryption technologies. A review of Congressional hearings and statements on the Congressional Record (n = 112) reveals that from 1993 to 1999, public debates were dominated by a market liberalization discourse in which participants supported loosening encryption controls as a way to protect privacy from criminal intrusions in market transactions. Also playing a role was a strong skepticism toward government power and a preference for markets as managers of crime prevention. Challenged by these critiques, lawmakers withdrew regulatory proposals and spent the following decade working quietly with private firms to ensure law enforcement surveillance capability. These findings show the expansion of privacy for consumers and entrepreneurs has in fact been used to achieve the contraction of privacy from law enforcement and intelligence agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technologies facilitate the existence of online spaces where understandings about race and racial inequality are co-created and contested as part of social networks and within the context of existing power relations and social identities. This project qualitatively explores US college students' exposure to and experiences with content on social media that they consider to be related to race and racial discrimination. Based on analysis of focus groups, we highlight the role of digital documentation, mediated spillover, and platform collapse as key processes in propagation and communication visibility of racial discourses. We begin by delineating first level-digital documentation that digitally captures local campus and national events from second-level digital documentation – the copying of already digitized content (e.g., via screenshotting). We then introduce the concept of 'platform collapse' – second-level digital documentation that enables mediated spillover of content in ways that disrupt discourse architectures, affordances, and audience contexts. Platform collapse emerged in student discussions of how content was documented and moved from relatively private to more public spaces to call attention to racist events, messages, and behavior, and to spur conversations and action. This extended reach and frequency, and also changed the context of racial discourses. Conversely, there was also evidence of platform collapse where content was moved from public to more private spaces to address social groundlessness and avoid masspersonal engagement on social media. We conclude by discussing implications of digital documentation and platform collapse for communication theory and methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even as attempts are being made to curtail the mass deployment of automated facial recognition systems in many countries, there are efforts to harvest new kinds of personal information from faces. Facial emotion recognition is a particularly ambitious form of facial analysis – an automated process in which faces are sorted amongst sets of categories – which has recently drawn criticism. The ways in which basic attributes of facial expression and emotion contradict the foundational assumptions of automated emotion recognition highlight larger conceptual problems with attempts to subject complex human phenomena to automated analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Internet freedom movements build infrastructures to promote online privacy, they enrol a wide range of different kinds of of technological work [Coleman, E. G., & Golub, A. (2008). Hacker practice: Moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism. Anthropological Theory, 8(3), 255–277]. I explore the cultures of the wider forms of technical work involved in these struggles through a sociological study of the Tor Project, involving twenty-six qualitative interviews with people in the Tor community and extensive archival research in Tor's mailing lists and design documents. Tor is an online privacy infrastructure whose practice of radical transparency makes it uniquely accessible, and it constitutes an example of a successful, widely used infrastructure which directly undermines the centralisation of governmental power online. Tor is not united around a single worldview, instead exhibiting three distinct framings of its work. Using Susan Leigh Star's social worlds framework, I characterise these three 'social worlds' of Tor. I argue that Tor has in the past accommodated its internal clashing perspectives through an ambiguity around politics and a shared construction of the users of Tor, which allow individuals to bridge and translate between these worlds. In recent years, this political ambiguity has become unsustainable. As Internet platforms and infrastructures extend further into social life around the world, so too are they being forced to come to terms with the shaping forces they exert on society and the values they represent. Tor is not exempt from this, and as it navigates these issues it is becoming increasingly mindful of its own relationships to power, values and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between location data and geodemographic knowledge by focusing on the role of the third-party mobile location analytics companies that passively capture location data from mobile advertising exchanges to develop new approaches to audience measurement. It argues that in addition to segmentation, a key objective is to calculate the performativity of algorithmically targeted advertising by measuring its capacity to drive foot traffic to particular locations. This is known as measuring audience 'lift' and reveals how the value of location data depends on how metrics can be created to prove their ability to influence behaviour. 'Second-order geodemographics' is proposed as a concept for theorizing the relationship between location-based classification and measurement and is grounded in a case study of one company to illustrate the ecosystem of mobile location analytics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the policing of sexual bodies via interactive online technologies. We draw from scholarly discourses regarding surveillance, queer theory, and affect to construct what we callinterpersonal panopticism. Interpersonal panopticism serves as a theoretical account of the fluid nature of watching and being watched in relationships, especially in consideration of how intimate relationships and sexualities are surveilled and controlled in a digital era. To articulate the utility and potentials of this theoretical approach, we offer five cultural propositions that serve as a basis for interpersonal panopticism. Collectively these propositions illustrate the utility and potentials of unpacking the interplay of surveillance, heteronormativity, and affect through an interpersonal panoptic lens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Surveillance technologies may be capable of monitoring a domain, but they need a sufficiently orderly domain to monitor. This article examines the secretive effort to institute artificial-intelligence-based ‘smart surveillance’ in the New York subway, using object- and pattern-recognition algorithms to identify dangerous activities in video feeds, such as a person abandoning a package. By considering the necessary preconditions for computer vision systems to recognize patterns and objects, I show how smart surveillance was challenged by the lack of visual and social uniformities necessary for smart surveillance systems to make its fine-toothed distinctions. In spite of vast resources and involvement of a major military contractor, the project was eventually deemed a failure. Although problems in computer vision are being incrementally solved, those improvements do not yet add up to a holistic technology capable of parsing the real-world ambiguity of open-ended settings which do not meet the assumptions of the detection algorithms. In the absence of technologies that can handle the actual mess, the world itself must cooperate, but it often does not. The article demonstrates the importance of looking beyond the claims of technical efficacy in the study of security and surveillance to discover how technologies of inspection and control actually work, as a means to cut through the heavy rhetorical packaging in which they are sold to their publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to argue that privacy, rather than serving only as a countermeasure against surveillance, can also be seen as its ‘partner-in-crime’. Normative statements made by governments and companies on privacy can be regarded as a tool of governance in service of informational capitalism. Initially defined as a fundamental freedom, privacy has become a precondition for a blossoming economy in the context of the information society. The notion of privacy, as a critique of information society, has been assimilated and reshaped by and in favour of informational capitalism, notably by being over-individualized through the self-determination principle. To develop this idea, this article builds on the results of a study on the loyalty programmes run by the four biggest retailers of Switzerland and on the Foucauldian concept of biopower. Indeed, sexual liberation and the development of scientific knowledge on sexuality, the democratization of privacy, and the emergence of scientific discourses about privacy are processes that show intriguing similarities. Like sexuality, privacy has become a ‘power-knowledge’ related to moral standards defining what privacy should be. It produces ‘subjects of privacy’ who are supposed to take care of it according to the official conception of privacy advocates and of the legislature. Finally, we suggest understanding the conception of privacy as a terrain of power struggle between the promoters of an informational capitalism based on surveillance of citizens and consumers, and those who would prefer to promote privacy as a common good leading society to more democracy and freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]