As of 1 September 2025, Marc Schuilenburg has been reappointed as Professor of Digital Surveillance at Erasmus School of Law. The chair within the Law, Society & Crime department, which Schuilenburg has held since 2021, offers the opportunity to research (the development of) new digital technologies from a legal, economic and societal context.
Digitalisation and AI have radically changed our daily lives, but they also have a major impact on law enforcement and security. The rapid rise of AI and all the data that comes with it raises questions about the legal and ethical implications of these technologies. What are the opportunities and risks? How can society optimally benefit from them? But also: how can ethics and law keep these new technologies manageable? This is precisely the intersection at which Schuilenburg operates.
The tension between values: How can AI be used with care?
Schuilenburg emphasises the tension between values in the world of AI and digital surveillance: "On one hand, AI offers unprecedented opportunities and can play a major role in the efficient detection and combating of crime, but we must not forget that non-discrimination, accountability and privacy are also important public values that must be protected."
Precisely these public values guide Schuilenburg's research in the field of digital surveillance. This was already apparent in his inaugural lecture Making Surveillance Public. In it, he argues for distancing ourselves from the view of AI in which its supposed technical and economic advantages prevail and sociological aspects such as human experiences and questions of power remain underexposed.
In his research and organised international conferences, including AI-Imaginations and AI-Experiences, Schuilenburg deliberately brings together digital expertise and social perspectives to better understand what we can achieve with big data and algorithms, but also what these technical developments do to us.
From evaluation to co-creation
In order to truly protect all these values, Schuilenburg emphasizes that it is important not to evaluate retrospectively, but to be involved in the development of new technologies from the start: "We need to develop new technology in such a way that what we as a society consider important is already taken into account in the design and development phase -think of anchoring public values, privacy and non-discrimination, as well as process-related values such as transparency and accountability."
He works on this in part through his role as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Police (WARP), to which he was appointed in January 2025. In the advisory report Navigating No Man's Land, he, as chair of the advisory group, makes eight recommendations for the responsible use of AI in police work, to which Chief of Police Janny Knol responded positively. But also in international projects such as the NWO project AI MAPS and EU project KOBAN, and in the Surveillance Studies Network, a platform he set up with his PhD candidates to promote interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration in the field of surveillance studies.
"Good technology does not create itself"
As Professor of Digital Surveillance, Schuilenburg will continue to focus on the responsible development of AI in the field of security and on expanding national and international collaborations in this area. He looks ahead: "For me, AI is not a neutral tool, but a product of societal choices. Good technology does not happen by itself. It requires us to think about the desired and undesired effects of using this technology and to explore new forms of collaboration. This is what I will be focusing on over the next four years."
Schuilenburg's approach, in which the development of new applications of AI and digital surveillance are considered in their context, fits seamlessly with the vision of Erasmus School of Law: that law does not exist in isolation but must always be viewed in its economic and social context.
The Board of Erasmus School of Law congratulates Marc Schuilenburg on his reappointment and wishes him all the best with his activities.
- Professor
