Your Smart Devices Could Rat You Out

Over 60 million households in the US use services like Amazon Echo, Google Nest, Ring, etc. Our devices routinely record our conversations and private activities. To talk about what it means to let these smart devices into our private lives, host Ali Muldrow is joined today by legal scholar Andrew Guthrie Ferguson. His new book, Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance asks the question: is digital surveillance truly protecting us or serving as a tool of authoritarianism?

Ferguson says that our smart devices shape our relationship to the government and the justice system. We don’t think about how the information our devices are collecting could be used against us, but the vast amount of information we are revealing with our smart devices is increasingly being used in criminal prosecutions, to both exonerate and convict.

There’s a tension here: a Google search could be used as evidence to catch a pedophile, but a Google search for abortion providers could be used against someone in a state where abortion care is illegal. People who attend No Kings rallies, organize against ICE in their communities, or who get pregnant in Texas are all vulnerable to their data being used against them.

Ferguson says that we’ve built a world full of data, but not one where there are any regulations on how that data is used. He discusses how data could be used to hold police accountable and the lack of political will to do so. There’s also little political will to hold wealthy and powerful people accountable for their crimes even when there is ample digital evidence, as with the Epstein files. 

He says that too often surveillance technologies are said to increase safety, but that we should be more careful about how we use them. For instance, school cameras are not a proxy for safety. 

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is a Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. A nationally recognized expert on predictive policing, facial recognition, video analytics, big data surveillance, the Internet of Things, juries, and the Fourth Amendment, he has written over 35 law review articles and book chapters on those and related topics. 

Featured image of the cover of Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance, available from NYU Press.

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