Selling surveillance

The discursive legitimation of AI control in Japanese convenience stores

Dados Bibliográficos

ID24019151
AutoresGwen Bouvier (0000-0003-1855-4258, Shanghai International Studies University), Yong Jiang (0000-0001-6192-8206, Shanghai International Studies University, autor correspondente), Jiang Yong (0000-0001-8495-4474, Shanghai International Studies University, P.R. China)
Ano2026
Data de publicação2026-08-04
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoDiscourse & Society (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0957-9265 • E-ISSN: 1460-3624
EditoraSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/09579265261463722
OpenAlexW7172484820
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas37

AI-driven surveillance technologies are marketed to Japanese convenience stores as solutions to rising crime. This article analyses the marketing materials of one technology company, Vaak, to examine how its system VaakEye is discursively constructed and how it legitimizes AI surveillance. The study is situated within a broader policy context in which the Japanese state promotes AI adoption through initiatives such as Society 5.0, while offering limited regulatory scrutiny. The analysis finds that AI is framed as an autonomous, ‘objective’, and common-sense solution, while customers and staff are represented as unreliable and suspicious, and therefore in need of technological oversight and behavioural managing. These representations draw on and reproduce ideologies of technological solutionism and safety and convenience, while obscuring the social and structural causes of crime. In so doing, they naturalize surveillance as necessary and desirable, and shift authority from human judgement to opaque algorithmic systems. This normalizes the expansion of data-driven monitoring in everyday life, contributing to a redistribution of power toward corporate actors and the infrastructures of surveillance capitalism. By framing these developments as inevitable and beneficial, opportunities for critical debate are foreclosed. This allows systems of behavioural control to become embedded in routine, everyday social practices like shopping.

Context (archaeology) · Control (management) · Critical discourse analysis · Framing (construction) · Ideology · Legitimacy · Legitimation · Situated · Social control · Social media · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Privacy, Security, and Data Protection