(21) CoC—Ch. 5, 153-167

Data and the threat to human autonomy

Data colonialism damages the core human values of freedom and autonomy.

To what extent does big data limit our ability to act in accordance with their own desires – – to be authentically us? 
Even more importantly, to what extent does big data limit our ability to maintain socially grounded integrity? – – Under the assumption that the social has become quantified.

It is likely that neither term, privacy or surveillance, adequately captures the status quo. 

Most commercialized the data collection, as well as most government – based data collection, does not violate current US law. To say that digital data collection is an invasion of privacy is currently a misnomer.

Likewise, most of the data surveillance that occurs even needs the usual sense of government surveillance as the watching is done by commercial entities with the tacit permission of users who have agreed to terms of service or privacy policies that allow the data collection in exchange for access to information or services.

Our authors also point out that the surveillance that characterizes big data collection is overly fragmented in comparison to the kind of surveillance we think of as intelligence officials follow around their subjects spies.

The deepest problem with current data collection techniques is the damage that it does to the minimal integrity of the self.

How are the ranges of action available to humans limited by big data?

The very purposes of big data collection are intended to channel and constrain human behavior. The very purposes of the data collection focus on getting humans to purchase certain objects or to go to certain places or utilize certain services – – each of these in contravention to alternatives. 

We have become sandwich boards on which life instructions are written and the only readers are us.

Double consciousness 2.0

Submission to tracking is a requirement of daily life; in the US, law does not protect citizens from tracking or the requirement.

“A continuously trackable life is a dispossessed life, whose space is continuously invaded and subjected to extraction by external power.”

“W. E. B. Du Bois called the outcome “double consciousness,” a situation in which the self is forced to describe itself in another’s language, one that overrides the language in which the colonial subject might otherwise choose to describe herself.”

“Whereas the violence of data colonialism affects all subjects, it also offers new opportunities for human beings to exploit each other by redistributing the resulting costs.”

Digital platform for data collection are being installed everywhere but they tend to affect folks in lower status and low-wage work jobs more strongly than those in higher categories. Further, those in powerful positions can seek control over those below them and then leverage the power of surveillance against those people. "Being in charge" now means being able to leverage the benefits and costs of surveillance.

“The threat that data colonialism poses to the minimal integrity of human life is therefore both a universal issue affecting everyone and the driver of new forms of social and economic inequality between people.”

Data colonialism's assault on human economy

Beware the results of attitude surveys as they very seldom reflect actual behavior. For decades a high percentage of Americans who are polled via surveys suggest that they are concerned over privacy and related surveillance issues. There is little to no evidence that more than a small percentage of people take meaningful actions against those intrusions.

Resigned and powerless? To an extent sure. But also, content with the results – – we like to be entertained, to be able to shop in convenient ways, to be able to play video games, to stream audio and video regardless of our location, to be told by convenient devices which turn to take next or were the best deals are on a meal or an item of clothing.

Authors such as ours often dismiss what everyday people see as the "upsides" of data colonialism. Most folks fail to see the costs and continue to think that products and services are presented as though they are free with the charge only being a small intrusion into privacy via data collection.

That everyday people do not recognize the magic – – the mystification – – that technology accomplishes is not so much a negative comment on everyday people as it is on the high-end technologists who have constructed this environment.

When simply cannot dismiss the fact that the digital, online, data-gathering environment has been constructed it enacted by technically sophisticated people who know exactly what they were doing. I think sometimes we cut computer scientists and competition engineers too much slack as though somehow they are blindly following instructions from above without knowing what the results would be. Generally think that's nonsense. One cannot write code that results in data collection from subjects without knowing that data is being collected from subjects. And it is unrealistic to expect common citizens to fully understand the processes that go on behind the curtain.

While the Internet was invented in public it is been deployed in secret.

“By installing automated surveillance into the space of the self, we risk losing the very thing—the open-ended space in which we continuously monitor and transform ourselves over time—that constitutes us as selves at all.”

While the initial thrust for the internet was to connect people to information, recall that a major justification for expansion of the Internet was the ways that it would connect people with each other. In fact, perhaps the most important factor that transformed the Internet away from information and toward sociality was the concept of "interactivity." And now we can see that the very core of what was supposed to make the Internet more useful is the piece that is most used against us. The more social we become by way of electronic digital devices, the more we become alienated from ourselves and others in favor of connection with commercial interests.

Data risks

There are direct harms to the use of data – – the wielding of power.

There are risks of data being misused against the people who provide the data especially when the data is being utilized by machines and machine- based decision-making rather than humans.

We know from prison studies that there are also harms to individuals just from being watched.

Datafication and the space of the self

Data analysis undermines areas in which one can move – – our own spaces

The situation harkens to Foucault’s analysis of prison systems that are based on observation. The panopticon was developed so that prisoners did not have to be watched – – in fact they could not all be watched. However, no single prisoner knew when they were being watched or not so had to assume they might be watched at any particular time.

we must recall that there can be no genuine self (no mutuality between selves) without the self having a space that is its own.