Digital tracking and profiling, personalizing users’ experience, monitoring their behavior, being “always on.” These are some of the practices that have become commonplace in the design of products and services. Framed in a positive light–promising to deliver user friendliness, speed, and convenience, these practices de facto reproduce policing logics, and serve a social control function. What are some of the common levers shared by policing and design to enforce social control, cultural hegemony, and normativity?
