Predatory Data

Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future

Author: Anita Say Chan

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Description

The first book to draw a direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today's often violent and extractive "big data" regimes.

Predatory Data illuminates the throughline between the nineteenth century's anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. With this book, Anita Say Chan offers a historical, globally multisited analysis of the relations of dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation expanded by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of Big Data.

While technological advancement has a tendency to feel inevitable, it always has a history, including efforts to chart a path for alternative futures and the important parallel story of defiant refusal and liberatory activism. Chan explores how more than a century ago, feminist, immigrant, and other minoritized actors refused dominant institutional research norms and worked to develop alternative data practices whose methods and traditions continue to reverberate through global justice-based data initiatives today. Looking to the past to shape our future, this book charts a path for an alternative historical consciousness grounded in the pursuit of global justice.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. to learn more.

Critic Reviews

"An illuminating and unsettling depiction of Big Tech as deeply enmeshed in an ethically compromised brand of social science." Publishers Weekly
"Anita Say Chan illuminates the throughline between the nineteenth century's anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. . . . Looking to the past to shape our future, Predatory Data effectively charts a path for an alternative historical consciousness grounded in the pursuit of global justice. . . . Invaluable."
Midwest Book Review
"Chan’s book shares lessons that society can learn from today’s global justice-based data initiatives and from the data collaborations of earlier feminists, immigrants, and other minorities who refused eugenic models." Eurasia Review

About the Author

Anita Say Chan is a feminist and decolonial scholar of Science and Technology Studies and Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Media Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.