ABSTRACT

Dataveillance has become one of the main features of govern activities currently, and it manifests not only as the watching of individuals in another scale (hyperveillance) but as a sociotechnical interaction involving risk classification and predictive devices. These systems direct efforts into crime prevention and risk management, instead of promoting unnecessary friction, and confrontations. Such arguments are in line with the current proposition of Shoshana Zuboff (2019) for whom “dataveillance” technologies enable a nonviolent form of power focused on taming individuals’ behaviors and decisions. In light of that, cases like the current experience of London’s Metropolitan Police in deploying the Gang Violence Matrix (GVM), used to identify and profile alleged gang nominals both become the scope of this article and reveals a much more complex reality.

KEYWORDS:
Dataveillance; Instrumentarian power; Symbolic violence; Sociotechnical Silencing