Entre os (Muitos) Sentidos de Big Data: A História, a Vigilância, o Controlo e a Criminalização

Laura Neiva

doi:10.21814/rlec.6294

Authors

Laura Neiva Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal/Centro de Estudos Jurídicos, Económicos e Ambientais, Universidade Lusíada Norte, Porto, Portugal https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1954-7597

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21814/rlec.6294

Keywords:

surveillance, big data, police, security, history

Abstract

This article critically analyses surveillance in the era of big data, exploring the multiple meanings attributed to it over time and tracing its historical evolution. Drawing on surveillance studies, it examines how surveillance practices have been shaped by socio-technical and security dynamics — ranging from early efforts focused on population management and policing to the consolidation of algorithmic infrastructures grounded in mass datafication. Rather than representing a definitive rupture, big data is shown to reconfigure and expand historical mechanisms of control, fostering a convergence between mass and targeted surveillance. The analysis demonstrates how monitoring technologies are embedded in techno-optimistic narratives that legitimise their proliferation while simultaneously reinforcing the collectivisation of suspicion and reorienting criminal investigation towards predictive and statistical models. Through a brief examination of the Portuguese context, the article discusses how the adoption of such technologies reflects a political aspiration for security modernisation, framed by discourses that portray technology as an inevitable response to crime. It concludes that algorithmic surveillance not only restructures policing and criminal justice but also raises profound ethical and political concerns. The increasing opacity of automated decision-making and its naturalisation within security discourse underscores the need for critical scrutiny to ensure that technological efficiency does not become an unquestioned principle of governance — at the expense of fundamental rights and the reproduction of structural inequalities.

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Author Biography

Laura Neiva, Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal/Centro de Estudos Jurídicos, Económicos e Ambientais, Universidade Lusíada Norte, Porto, Portugal

Laura Neiva is an invited assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Minho, Portugal. She is also a collaborating researcher at both the Communication and Society Research Centre at the same institute and the Center for Legal, Economic, International and Environmental Studies at Lusíada University – North, in Porto, Portugal. She holds a bachelor's degree in Criminology from the Faculty of Law, University of Porto (2017), a master's degree in Crime, Difference and Inequality from the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Minho (2019), and a PhD in Sociology from the same institution (2024).
Neiva is the author of the book Big Data na Investigação Criminal: Desafios e Expectativas na União Europeia (Big Data in Criminal Investigation: Challenges and Expectations in the European Union, Editora Húmus). Her research interests focus on the social studies of science and technology, emerging technologies in criminal investigation, big data, surveillance studies, policing, and the role of expectations.

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