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Reference

Ferguson, A. G. (2026). Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance. NYU Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.35529379

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Welcome to Revise and Resubmit 🎧📚, and to this episode of Weekend Book Review.

There are books that arrive like arguments, and there are books that arrive like warnings whispered just a little too late. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson’s Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance, published on 17 March 2026 by New York University Press, feels to me like both. It is not simply a book about technology, and not only a book about law. It is a book about us, about the quiet bargain we make every day with the glowing, listening, tracking devices we welcome into our homes, our cars, our wrists, and finally, our lives. 🔍📱⌚🏠

I came to this book with a familiar modern assumption, that convenience is innocent. That if a smartwatch helps me sleep better, or a smart speaker makes life easier, then the story ends there. But Ferguson asks us to sit still for a harder truth. What if the same technologies that comfort us also testify against us? What if the digital traces of ordinary life become the raw material of suspicion, prosecution, and control? ⚖️🧠

And Ferguson is exactly the kind of guide you want for such a reckoning. He is a Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School, a nationally recognized expert on surveillance technologies, policing, and criminal justice, and the author of the award-winning The Rise of Big Data Policing. He writes with the authority of a legal scholar, yes, but also with the urgency of someone who understands that the future is already here, and that it has been quietly drafting its case against us. 🧾🚨

In this episode, I want to linger with Ferguson’s central claim that we are living inside a new architecture of self-surveillance, one built not by force alone, but by habit, desire, and design. Our phones, our apps, our smart homes, our medical devices, even our online searches can become witnesses. Sometimes they solve crimes. Sometimes they serve justice. But Ferguson insists that when law lags behind technology, freedom pays the price. And that is the unsettled pulse running through this book. It asks whether privacy is still a right, or whether it has become a nostalgic memory. 🕵️‍♂️💡📡

So today, here on Revise and Resubmit, I want to open this book not as a distant legal text, but as a mirror held up to the way we live now, connected, convenient, exposed.

My thanks to the editors and to New York University Press for bringing this important work into the world. 🙏📖

If you enjoy thoughtful book conversations like this, please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, and to the Weekend Researcher channel on YouTube. You can also find us on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcasts 🎙️💙

And as we begin, here is the question I cannot shake: when our devices know us better than our neighbors do, who exactly are they really speaking for? 🤔