New prevention tasks

The dangers of smart technologies reinforce the dangers inherent in any form of prevention. Prevention is always problematic or quickly becomes problematic when it is directed at individuals, groups or entire rooms, cities, districts. Prevention that focuses on concrete actions and situations is far better protected against these dangers. Why? Prevention that wants to identify who will be dangerous in the future or where it could be dangerous, must always try to look into the future on the basis of certain characteristics. Smart technologies simplify this, but they also make it more dangerous in the sense that they produce a lot of “false positives”, a lot of what you would call statistically false alarms. Through a certain combination of technologies and presumptions that go into technologies, groups of people and spaces are identified that are supposed to be dangerous, and then everyone who falls into this category is suddenly potentially dangerous. And this poses great problems for the rule of law, for freedom from discrimination and also for informational self-determination. In this respect, smart technologies reinforce the problems that are inherent in all types of prevention and that everyone involved in prevention is aware of.

• Hinweis zu Gefahren von Prävention: Belina, Bernd (2005): Räumliche Strategien kommunaler Kriminalpolitik in Ideologie und Praxis. In: Glasze, Georg; Robert Pütz & Manfred Rolfes (Hrsg.): Diskurs – Stadt – Kriminalität. Bielefeld: transcript: 137-166. /Weitere Publikationen.
• Bernd Belina bei Wikipedia