GGIS Colloquium | Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future
- Sponsor
- Geography & GIS
- Speaker
- Dr. Anita Say Chan, Professor of Information Sciences and Media
- Cost
- This talk is free and open to the public with a Zoom option.
- Registration
- Zoom RSVP
- Contact
- Geography & GIS
- geography@illinois.edu
- Originating Calendar
- Geography & Geographic Information Science
Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future
The insidious legacy of eugenics lives on in the techno-surveillance, algorithmic authoritarianism, and data-driven discrimination of Big Tech. This book explains how it happened and why we need to fight back.
Predatory Data (University of California Press, 2025) illuminates the throughline between the 19th century's anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. Predatory Data reveals how the AI-driven and market-based models of Big Tech are built on data that exploit women and immigrant groups, amplifying social hierarchies and AI's predictions of majoritarian outcomes as the most probable and “ideal” futures. But it doesn’t have to be this way.