Imaginaries and infrastructures of platform security

Abstract This paper develops the notion of ‘Platform Security’ to analyse the type of security power that seeks to work through facilitation and decentralised connection. The paper draws an analogy between the metaphor and model of the platform economy and contemporary security practices. It analyses the imaginaries and infrastructures of the platform economy and shows how these are present in the work of transnational security authorities. Like online platforms, contemporary security practitioners seek to connect local players in a manner that is data-driven and decentred. Like digital platforms, security organisations like FATF and Europol seem to understand themselves as utilities or services, whose primary aim is to ‘transmit communication and information data’ that they have not themselves produced or commissioned (Van Dijck 2013: 6). Analysing platform security through this lens, allows the development critical purchase on this mode of security power and raise critical questions about the organisation of responsibility and protections.