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Introduction to the Special Issue: Resisting Surveillance Through Data Visibility and Invisibility

Natasha Tusikov, Merouan Mekouar and Francesco Cavatorta

Making Sense of Workplace Surveillance: How Workers and Union Representatives Experience, Imagine, and Resist Surveillance Exposure

Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, Xavier Parent-Rocheleau, Kenza Benkrid and Yanick Provost Savard
The field of surveillance studies is paying growing attention to workplace surveillance, alongside research on state and police surveillance or other social contexts such as prisons, hospitals, or “smart” cities. As the workplace becomes digitalized, a sharp increase is observed in the prevalence and opacity of employee surveillance technologies, which collect a significant amount of data on their behaviours, performance, attitudes, and emotions. This study, conducted in partnership with Quebec’s three main union confederations, analyzes how workers and union representatives make sense of workplace surveillance and resist it. Drawing on focus groups with thirty union representatives and open-ended survey questions answered by 529 workers, we point out their direct and vicarious experiences of exposure to workplace surveillance. We then analyze the process by which they make sense of their exposure through legitimization, attribution to managerial flaws, and metaphorization and at the same time build dark imaginaries of surveillance fraught with guesses, concerns, and fears about the potential opacity, function creep, persistence in time, and privacy invasion of these technologies. This process shapes seven types of individual and collective responses. We position these responses on a continuum from the least to the most potent in restoring data justice by curbing the deployment and use of workplace surveillance. Responses at the individual level comprise indifference, self-protection, and quitting and carry little potency to restore data justice. Responses at the collective level, however, consisting of sensitization, sousveillance, bargaining, and legal action, show large-scale tangible outcomes.

Enter the Ring: Artistic Interventions in Facial Recognition and Domestic Surveillance

Craig Fahner, Evan Light and Quinn MacNeil
The use of domestic surveillance products such as Amazon’s Ring doorbell system has, in recent years, become widespread. While the fisheye lenses and glowing blue LED buttons of Ring doorbells have become familiar sights on doorsteps in North America and beyond, little information is presented to end users regarding Ring’s relationships with police agencies and data brokers, and, perhaps most significantly, its deployment of emerging facial recognition technologies. This paper examines the emergence of the Ring doorbell and similar home security products, attempting to unravel the possibilities and dangers of the increasing implementation of facial recognition technologies in domestic and public space. We deploy a research-creation method to bring these possibilities and risks to the fore. Our interactive exhibition Enter the Ring seeks to invert the information asymmetry held by the proprietors of proprietary domestic surveillance platforms: where Amazon and other businesses conceal the myriad ways that their video surveillance products quantify individuals and draw inferences from human faces, our installation instead serves as a mirror that reveals to the audience the extent to which these techniques can be deployed to make predictions as to an individual’s identity and, ultimately, whether they might be deemed risky or safe. We argue that this kind of artistic intervention using interactive media serves a crucial role in bridging the information gap around facial recognition technologies and may be used to benefit both public education and regulatory action regarding algorithmic surveillance.

Building an Articulate and Collective Resistance to Surveillance Technologies in Brazil

Kainen Bell and Thallita G. L. Lima
Facial recognition technologies (FRTs) have rapidly expanded as instruments of algorithmic governance, reorganizing regimes of visibility, classification, and control. In Brazil, their diffusion intersects with long-standing racialized forms of urban management, disproportionately targeting Black and peripheral communities under the narrative of enhanced public security. Rather than being supported by evidence of effectiveness, these deployments are driven by techno-solutionist imaginaries that frame technological innovation as the preferred response to structural social issues, enabling experimental systems to circulate with limited legal, social, or technopolitical safeguards. This article examines how Brazilian grassroots organizations and civil society coalitions mobilize to contest this expansion through counter-surveillance practices, legal and policy challenges, public advocacy, and data activism. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative research, including sustained engagement with the national campaign Tire Meu Rosto Da Sua Mira, the analysis situates these practices within debates in surveillance studies, science and technology studies (STS), and critical race and feminist approaches to technology. The article argues that resisting FRTs requires not only exposing technical failures but also reshaping the sociotechnical imaginaries that render these systems legitimate. By foregrounding situated resistance emerging at the intersection of racial justice, urban inequality, and data activism, the study shows how these actors contest the normalization of biometric surveillance and articulate alternative, more democratic visions of public security.

Disrupting the Market in Bodily Data Through Data Decommodification

Natasha Tusikov
Pervasive tracking of people and the wholesale capture of their data are foundational elements of the data economy. This article explores what opposition to the normalisation of surveillance and commodification of data might entail, with a focus on period-tracking apps, which enable users to monitor their menstrual cycles and identify fertile timeframes to manage pregnancy and symptoms related to menstruation. The article is guided by the following questions: how do period-tracking apps commodify users’ bodily data and how might data decommodification be a response to the harms from period-tracking apps’ data-intensive business models? Designed to make a theoretical intervention and taking a political economy approach, the article develops the concept of data decommodification from Karl Polanyi’s (2001) concept of fictitious commodities. To explore data decommodification, the article comparatively assesses two period-tracking apps, the UK-headquartered Flo Health and the Germany-based Clue, with a focus on their data practices in the United States and European Union, respectively. Data decommodification demands a new set of social relations and government responsibilities in the data economy, including privacy and data protection, the restriction of apps’ trade in health data by regulators, and the prohibition of the commercial trade in health data.

Staring Back at the Surveillance Gaze: The Resistance of LGBTQ+ Users on Social Media

Alex Chartrand
Digital platforms and social media shape social, economic, and political life, making participation almost unavoidable (Van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal 2018; Steinberg 2019). This platformization, driven by datafication, records and commodifies user activity for corporate profit (West 2019). While users perceive their engagement as private, they present a public persona that is subject to commercial and political surveillance (Baym and boyd 2012; Zuboff 2015). LGBTQ+ users face a paradox: social media is crucial for identity formation, community building, and self-expression (Robards et al. 2019), yet they encounter intensified algorithmic surveillance through content moderation tactics such as shadowbanning, demonetization, and account suspension (Are 2022; Bivens and Haimson 2016; Gillespie 2022). This study examines how LGBTQ+ users in Montréal and Berlin navigate platform regulations and resist algorithmic oppression via qualitative interviews with cultural producers, activists, and performers. Findings reveal two central themes: being seen and looking back. LGBTQ+ users are keenly aware of surveillance, exemplified by Astra, a Berlin-based activist, whose account was deleted after managing a queer collective’s social media. Confronted with inevitable monitoring, users adopt strategies like creating backup accounts, using alternative promotional methods, and deliberately defying censorship. This resistance is taxing; Sasha Kills, a Berlin-based drag artist, notes: “We don’t have a choice, and it is really unfair.” The research deepens data‑justice discussions by showing that resistance is not merely emergent but a mandatory practice for LGBTQ+ users in digital spaces. Ignoring surveillance jeopardizes their ability to benefit from platform affordances. In an era of platformization and the growing co‑optation of social structures, being excluded from platforms is a risk they cannot afford.

Sousveillance as an Ambiguous Practice of Negotiating In/Visibility: The Case of Forensic Architecture

Mina Godarzani-Bakhtiari
Hardly anywhere are the consequences of data invisibility more life-threatening than at national borders, creating a vicious cycle of surveillance, violence, and death. Sousveillance initiatives challenge this by making violence visible. While their work aims to educate the public about state violence, the complex relationship between sousveillance and visibility needs further exploration. Sousveillance claims to be a communicative act of resistance; assessing this claim requires examining how visibility is produced and what form it assumes. The work of Forensic Architecture (FA), a sousveillance research agency, is fruitful for this, as its investigative videos aim to show how evidence is made. Using comparative video artefact analysis to examine a video in which FA presents its reconstruction of the 2020 shooting of a Syrian refugee at the Turkish-Greek border, this study details the complex, sequential process of producing visibility of violence as evidence. I will show that FA conducts a culturally specific form of analysis in which data interpreting and synthesizing information are carried out by establishing an abstract understanding of space. The visibility produced by FA is inherently ambiguous: It de- and re-subjectivizes, abstracts from social difference, and differentiates the subjects in question. These ambiguities highlight the challenges of negotiating data in/visibility and provide new insights into debates on sousveillance as resistance in the context of state violence.

Gates’ Targeted: Corporations and the Police Surveillance Economy

Roberta da Silva Medina

Crooks’ Access Is Capture: How EdTech Reproduces Racial Inequality

Pavithra Suresh

Avis, Marciniak, and Sapignoli’s States of Surveillance: Ethnographies of New Technologies in Policing and Justice

Roger von Laufenberg

Ray Brescia’s The Private is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism

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