People’s strategies for perceived surveillance in Amsterdam Smart City

In this paper, we investigate people’s perception of datafication and
surveillance in Amsterdam Smart City. Based on a series of focus
groups, we show how people understand new forms of hypervisbi-
lity, what strategies they use to navigate these experiences, and what
the limitations of these strategies are. We show how people tried to
discern between public and private sector actors, to differentiate who
they trusted by building on the existing social contract. People also
trusted the objectivity of data in relation to prior experiences of social
contexts and discrimination. Lastly, we show how the experiences of
some of the inhabitants in our study who were most vulnerable to
hypervisibility highlight the limits to strategies based on the neutral-
ity of data. By asking about perceived surveillance rather than
emphasising actual practices of surveilling, we show differentiated
contexts and strategies, providing empirical grounds to question the
dominant technical framing of smart cities.