Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future

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. Visit to learn more.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of California Press; First Edition (January 7, 2025)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 262 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0520402847
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0520402843
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.9 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.6 x 9 inches