By Anita Say Chan

Predatory Data illuminates the connections between the nineteenth century’s anti‑immigration and eugenics movements and today’s sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. Historical and globally multisited, the book examines how dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation are being magnified by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of Big Data. Technological advancement has a history, including efforts to chart a path for alternative futures. Anita Say Chan explores these important parallel stories of defiant refusal and liberatory activism, such as how feminist, immigrant, and other minoritized actors worked to develop alternative data practices. Their methods and traditions, over a century old, continue to reverberate through global justice‑based data initiatives today. Predatory Data charts a path for an alternative historical consciousness grounded in the pursuit of global justice. “Anita Say Chan highlights the power of community‑based alternatives to extractive data that are rooted in feminist, people of color, and Indigenous perspectives.

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2025. 263p.