Internationally, police forces are gaining increasing capacities to conduct algorithmic surveillance in law enforcement, including real-time facial recognition and AI-based analyses for identifying risks, anticipating potential future crimes and enabling interventions before offences have been committed. These developments are driven by high political expectations that AI will make law enforcement more efficient, prevent crime, support criminal investigations and judicial proceedings, and enhance security.
The project, Governing Privacy under Algorithmic Surveillance in Law Enforcement, funded by the Swedish Research Council, examines how the meaning and boundaries of privacy are shaped and negotiated through policy, regulation and policing practices. It takes a comparative approach to Sweden and the United Kingdom, drawing on the UK's longer experience of AI surveillance in policing to provide valuable perspectives on developments now taking place in Sweden.
Discussions tend to focus on simplistic dichotomies
The project is led by Marie Eneman at the Department of Applied Information Technology, University of Gothenburg. The research team also includes Diana Miranda, University of Stirling, Lachlan Urquhart, University of Edinburgh, and Jan Ljungberg, University of Gothenburg. The research group also contributes to the SOM Institute's annual national survey, which includes questions about public attitudes towards police use of different surveillance technologies and their perceived implications for privacy. This provides a valuable perspective on how citizens understand and value privacy in relation to surveillance.
According to Marie Eneman, discussions about the expanding use of digital and AI-based surveillance in policing often become confined to a trade-off between security and privacy.
‘The risks to fundamental rights are important to recognise, but we also need to move beyond this rather simplistic dichotomy,’ says Marie Eneman.
Surveillance raises questions about democracy
The project examines how the meaning and boundaries of privacy are shaped through the technologies, laws and institutional practices that make surveillance possible. As the state's capacity to see, collect information, acquire knowledge about citizens and act upon that knowledge expands, the complex infrastructures through which surveillance operates are becoming increasingly difficult for citizens to scrutinise and understand.
‘It is important for the police to draw on emerging technologies in their efforts to combat crime. But as the state's capacity to surveil, collect information and act upon that knowledge grows, democratic oversight must also be designed to be meaningful and possible to exercise in practice. This raises fundamental questions about the relationship between the state and its citizens, how the conditions of privacy are changing, and how expanding surveillance capacities can be regulated and scrutinised,’ says Marie Eneman.
