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In this paper, we investigate people's perception of datafication and surveillance in Amsterdam Smart City. Based on a series of focus groups, we show how people understand new forms of hypervisbility, what strategies they use to navigate these experiences, and what the limitations of these strategies are. We show how people tried to discern between public and private sector actors, to differentiate who they trusted by building on the existing social contract. People also trusted the objectivity of data in relation to prior experiences of social contexts and discrimination. Lastly, we show how the experiences of some of the inhabitants in our study who were most vulnerable to hypervisibility highlight the limits to strategies based on the neutrality of data. By asking about perceived surveillance rather than emphasising actual practices of surveilling, we show differentiated contexts and strategies, providing empirical grounds to question the dominant technical framing of smart cities.

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Executive Summary IntroductionThis report is based on a year of research into how citizens in Amsterdam are becoming producers of digital data through their use of technology, and the ways in which that data is becoming -or will likely become in the future -part of the way the city is governed. We focused primarily on spatial data (geo-information), defined as any digital data that indicates a person's location or movements. Today, we produce spatial data with everything we do, and in the future, it is likely that these data generated by city infrastructure and registration systems will become merged and linked with data generated directly by city residents such as social media postings, data from self-tracking devices and smart homes, maps generated by crowdsourcing, drones, and feedback of all kinds.We have a specific focus on the citizen's perspective. What kind of governance of digital data creates an equal playing field for the elderly, the young, the vulnerable or marginalised? For non-users of smart technologies, non-citizens, speakers of other languages? With this in mind, we conducted 20 expert interviews and 8 focus groups in Amsterdam over the course of 2015, aiming to include participants who were currently missing from, or marginalised by, current discussions and practices of smart city development, and also those whose lives might be changed most by an increase in urban datafication. Our discussions highlighted several groups: nonnatives; ethnic or religious minorities; children and the elderly; those who opted out of using the technologies currently seen as necessary for citizen involvement in the smart city (i.e. smartphones); those who operate in highly regulated professions, and freelancers who are responsible for their own working environment. Future scenariosBased on our expert interviews we constructed four possible future scenarios which then informed the focus group discussions. The first, data utopia/dystopia, combines a situation where individuals are highly traceable with strong city control over data, monitoring both public and private spaces in real time. This means the city can profile people in great detail and to target policies and services to a neighbourhood or even household level, leading to efficient service provision and control over public safety -but it also leads to social engineering by policymakers and researchers, and tension that ultimately decreases social cohesion. The second scenario, 'Anonydam', involves greater individual anonymity combined with city-led control over data. In this scenario activist pressure makes the city take leadership in ensuring privacy, creating its own urban apps and minimising the extent to which its partners can share data. The tradeoff is that people must be more involved and active to get the services they need, and that criminal networks take advantage of the possibility of anonymity to flourish.