This research seeks to comprehend power relations in a platform cooperativism experience in Araraquara, São Paulo, Brazil, in 2022. The project was initiated by a workers' cooperative that acquired the franchise of the Bibi Mob platform with the support of the city's municipality through its solidarity economy incubator. The experience failed eight months after its inception.

This article applies a neo-materialist perspective, mapping the datafication process in the app to analyse how the global power relations of infrastructural global platforms - mainly Google and Amazon - were crucial to the end of the experience. The dependence on a global platform ecosystem and the franchised platform limited the workers' ability to act.

Drawing from a Southern Global experience, the research challenges platform cooperativism, colonialism and data sovereignty. The article argues that the modus operandi of platform power is exercised through a disciplinary power that produces "autonomy under surveillance".

Analysing a failed partnership allows one to discuss platform cooperativism and examine the manifestations of power in the Global South.

This study examines the social construction of digital surveillance through the work of the PEGA committee, an EU inquiry committee investigating the misuse of spyware by Member States. We’ve conducted thematic qualitative analysis of the committee’s public discussions with stakeholders from academia, tech industry, and the civil society. We focused on the following questions: Who are the stakeholders? How do they frame commercial spyware? And how do they use this framing strategically to affect the eventual policy language. Our research contributes to existing literature on the growing power of technology companies as governance actors. While our preliminary findings affirm the dominance of big-tech companies in the governance of spyware, we also observe smaller-tech companies gaining increasingly powerful positions by controlling access to personal information. Other preliminary findings highlight the role of human agency in policymaking as EU policymakers reflect on how their own vulnerability vis-à-vis spyware affects the policymaking process. As we continue our analysis, our paper will offer a nuanced account of the social construction of spyware in the committee’s work. In doing so, we aim to engage in exploration of changes in the power arrangements of information technologies’ governance.

The widespread collection of vehicle data poses many privacy and justice issues. With the increasing datafication of vehicles, new questions are emerging, which are troublingthe imaginaries of different actors. This paper asks: How does the future-oriented imaginary of datafication relate to current practices in vehicle data, particularly for policing? At the same time, how is this imaginary unfolding as privacy/justice concerns for activists and regulators? It draws from semi-structured interviews with over 30 people working on algorithmic surveillance—including police officers and surveillance manufacturers, but also activists and regulators. It also builds on fieldwork conducted at policing/traffic conferences, particularly sessions on “the future” or “emergent technologies”.

It finds: 1) In direct relation to Gekker & Hind’s (2019) concept of “infrastructural surveillance”, that vehicles are already imagined as connected computers, constantly generating surveillance data. Among activists and regulators, this future leads to anxiety around function creep, as manufacturers may decide to change their policies, or new forms of analysis may be enabled for policing; 2) How concern over a future of data excess exists, particularly for policing institutions. This is responded through increased efforts of data integration and a techno-solutionist narrative of AI, but also smaller interventions. For activists, this relates to wider fears over "predictive policing" and its injustices.

The paper thus contributes to critical data studies literature, supporting renewed considerations for privacy and justice frameworks in a world where vehicles act as infrastructures for constant surveillance.

Cameras, whether built into phones or security systems, are a common fixture of daily life. Yet despite their ubiquity, people do not perceive all forms of filming as being equally appropriate, necessary, or desirable. To investigate public reactions to competing surveillance regimes, this study draws on the filmed provocations of First Amendment auditors to observe how people respond to the violation of the norms around filming in public. Average people in places like post offices, DMVs, or on public sidewalks frequently berate auditors about the supposed illegality and rudeness of recording them while standing in front of prominently displayed security cameras or appealing to nearby police officers with active body cameras. The dissonance of these reactions provokes the research question explored here: Why do people react more strongly to being recorded by some cameras than others? In identifying distinctions made by members of the public between the form, purpose, and risks presented by three types of cameras now common in daily life—surveillance cameras, phone cameras, and police body cameras—this study seeks to understand the conditions under which filming is considered acceptable or unacceptable by ordinary Americans, and how much those conditions rely on what feels like privacy.