The use of people’s online digital traces has given rise to concerns for democracy. The digital traces may affect the individual’s life in unexpected and negative ways. Such traces may also be of importance for understanding the spread of disinformation and the like. This paper reports on a Foucault inspired discourse analysis of the Swedish upper secondary mathematics curriculum. Two discourses are construed in the intersection of critical thinking, democracy, and this new technology. Skovsmose’s concept of mathemacy is used to identify what is critical knowledge and what is not. The first construed discourse is, “With knowledge in formal mathematics, critical thinking on democracy will follow.” The second is, “Rather a personal career than a critical citizenship.” Neither of the discourses promotes a need for mathematics education to change due to new technology with regards to critical thinking.

Implementations of Big Data analysis are reshaping society. The novel ways mathematics operate in society warrants new efforts for mathematics education, both in teaching the new technology and in providing an ethical and critical awareness of its implications. This interview study investigates pre-service teachers' ethical reasoning in data science contexts, focusing on aspects of access to the data that underpin the technology. Findings show that pre-service teachers offer a wide array of ethical arguments related to access to data, that informs their effort to think critically on oppressive situations. However, there is also an indication that their reasoning can be limited by lacking understanding of the related data science methodology, implying that mathematics teacher education should encompass more of this.