From predictive policing to self-surveillance to private security, the potential uses to of big data in crime control pose serious legal and ethical challenges relating to privacy, discrimination, and the presumption of innocence. The book is about the impacts of the use of big data analytics on social and crime control and on fundamental liberties.

Drawing on research from Europe and the US, this book identifies the various ways in which law and ethics intersect with the application of big data in social and crime control, considers potential challenges to human rights and democracy and recommends regulatory solutions and best practice. This book focuses on changes in knowledge production and the manifold sites of contemporary surveillance, ranging from self-surveillance to corporate and state surveillance. It tackles the implications of big data and predictive algorithmic analytics for social justice, social equality, and social power: concepts at the very core of crime and social control.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students of criminology, sociology, politics and socio-legal studies.

About the Author

Ales Zavrsnik is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Reviews

"Data science is having profound effects on public and private life. However, thanks to a combination of technical complexity, proprietary privilege, and secretive state practice, both policy makers and the public remain largely in the dark about its uses and implications. This book offers desperately needed insights into the ways that Big Data analytics are being developed and applied in the domains of law enforcement, crime control and criminal justice. Alex Zavrsnik has compiled a critically important collection of essays that shed light on the profound changes afoot in the way societies define, investigate, prosecute, and punish crime and criminality. These scholars are sounding the alarm about the major challenges that Big Data poses to civil rights and social justice, unpacking some of the ways that new systems of data analytics are undermining legal concepts and tenets that are fundamental to democratic governance. The volume covers considerable ground: how predictive policing and algorithmic sentencing exacerbate racial and class-based discrimination; how data analytics not only fails to prevent but enables financial crimes and tax evasion among economic elites; how "informed consent" morphs into "forced consent" with ubiquitous data tracking; how automated policing pushes toward total information capture; how different legal concepts of privacy have shaped the possibilities of judicial oversight of mass data collection; how international law addresses cyber-espionage; and more. It is a must-read for anyone concerned with how Big Data and predictive analytics are disrupting and destabilizing the institutions and ideals of democracy."

- Kelly Gates, Department of Communication and Science Studies Program, University of California San Diego, USA

Book Information
ISBN 9780367227562
Author Ales Zavrsnik
Format Paperback
Page Count 230
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 453g