As location and the nearby environment become increasingly prominent for our communications, filtering flows of information and shaping our networks, geolocation technology and emergent forms of usage to govern information and visualize populations raise important questions as to how locative media could be used as tools of governmentality. Using Google's location platform Places as a primary example, this article will argue that location platforms are underpinned by a geodemographical spatial ordering according to which subjects are located for the purpose of economic government. Particular attention is paid to the political economy of location platforms and the role of their underlying algorithms and databases in rendering social space subject to novel forms of commodification. Drawing on Foucault's governmentality analytic framework, the article concludes by delineating a critical framework to assess the mentalities and strategies of government that the generalized geocoding of information is giving rise to.

The rise of smart phone use, and its convergence with mapping infrastructures and large search and social media corporations, has led to a commensurate rise in the importance of location. While locations are still defined by fixed longitude/latitude coordinates, they now increasingly ‘acquire dynamic meaning as a consequence of the constantly changing location-based information that is attached to them’ becoming ‘a near universal search string for the world’s data’. As the richness of this geocoded information increases, so the commercial value of this location information also increases. This article examines the growing commercial significance of location data. Informed by recent calls for ‘medium-specific analysis’, we build on earlier work to argue that social media companies actively extract location data for commercial advantage in quite specific ways. By not paying due and careful attention to the specifics of data extraction strategies, political and cultural economic analyses of new media services risk eliding key differences between new media platforms, and their respective software systems, patterns of consumer use, and individual revenue models. In response, we develop a comparative analysis of two platforms – Foursquare and Google – and examine how each extracts and uses geocoded user data. From this comparative exploration of platform specificity, we aim to draw conclusions concerning marketing (economic) surveillance, and how Foursquare’s and Google’s operations work in the service of fostering the securitization of mobility - the process by which the capacity to track and predict mobility and associated patterns of consumption is directly productive of value.

Background  This article is a case study about a surveillance system deployed in a Latin American city that collects and analyses geocoded historical crime data in order to identify crime hot spots.Analysis  The case study focuses on the adoption of this technology by data collectors and the institutional cultures that mediate its workings. The article documents the conflicting adjustment strategies carried out by low-level police officers when the same crime data that they help to produce are operationalized as labour performance indicators.Conclusion and implications  Drawing from scholarship in the field of critical data studies, this work situates the practices of data generation within institutional power relations to shed light on the particular politics at play in data-driven policing systems in the Latin American context.Contexte  Cet article présente une étude de cas sur un système de surveillance, mis en œuvre dans une ville d’Amérique-latine, qui collecte et analyse des données de criminalité historiques géocodées afin d’identifier les points chauds de cette criminalité. Analyse  L’étude de cas porte sur l’adoption de cette technologie par les collecteurs de données et sur les cultures institutionnelles qui en assurent son fonctionnement. L’article décrit les stratégies d’ajustement problématiques mises en œuvre par les officiers de police de rang inférieur lorsque les mêmes données sur la criminalité qu’ils aident à collecter, sont utilisées en tant qu’indicateurs de leur performance professionnelle par l’institution.Conclusion et implications  Sur la base des développements dans le domaine des études de données critiques, ce travail situe les pratiques de génération de données au milieu des relations de pouvoir institutionnelles afin de mettre en lumière la dimension politique présente dans la mise en œuvre de systèmes de surveillance.

Nuestro estudio localiza la implementación de macrodatos (big data) y la inteligencia artificial que avanza hoy en el Sur Global dentro de la agenda de “datos para el desarrollo”, en culturas como las latinoamericanas, caracterizadas por grandes asimetrías sociales y una corrupción estructural –herederas del proceso de colonización–, con el fin de evidenciar los problemas de automatización en sistemas alimentados por datos que han sido históricamente objeto de manipulación, o corrupción de datos. Para ello examinamos dos casos de mal funcionamiento en infraestructuras de información de programas de asistencia social en Colombia (Ingreso Solidario y Sisben) y exploramos el archivo de la teoría crítica latinoamericana con el objetivo de iluminar los procesos de datificación en estas condiciones. Finalmente, nuestra aproximación responde a los llamados a cuestionar el supuesto universalismo de los datos y a ir más allá de las miradas tecnocéntricas sobre el funcionamiento de estas tecnologías, desplazando el foco de atención a los momentos en que estas fallan, a los imaginarios sociotécnicos locales y a la agencia política de aquellos que se resisten a su control normativo.

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