User:Lokio2021/Data Power

Data power is the capacity of data to influence and transform a particular set of relations and activities. Crucial to managing and policing populations, data are a key asset used by organizations and government agencies to profile, sort and control citizen behaviour. Unequal in nature, data and its associated power, have varying affects on social groups, reproducing inequalities and discrimination. Data power is a main focus of data politics which highlights the political struggles around data assemblage, as each system is constructed through choices and practices that are infused with policies. Raising questions like whose interests data serve, how and which data are produced, and how organizations and governments seek to exert data power in practice, data capitalism, an expression and form of data power, arises when data act as a key asset for leveraging value and capital accumulation through data dispossession.

Data Power

What is Data Power

Data power is defined as the potential to influence and transform data and social activities. Unequal in nature, data power is strong and concentrated with the ability to consolidate to deepen existing data power. With varying concentrations of data power, data driven technologies employed by various actors mediate consumer experience and access to extract profit, monitor, and control consumer behaviour. As conversations of open data spread globally, concerns about data as a commodity raise questions about data power and its role in data practices and power relations. Data activists seek to resist, challenge and oppose data power by enacting counter strategies that assert data rights, and limit and prevent data harm. An example of such activism includes the Data Power Conferences in 2015, 2017, and 2019 where experts suggested if new perspectives for critical data studies were to be developed, data power needs to be at the forefront in order to understand its influence and permeation in society.

Current Conversations about Data Power

The idea of open data, promising transparency, accountability and participation, is spreading globally to serve the interests of society and the economy more broadly. The case for open data includes improving internal operations and external relations of public bodies, empowering citizens and addressing asymmetries in data power between the state and its subject, economic stimulation, and an open and accountable government. However, concerns about open data remain to be centred around data power and catering to stakeholders with established data power, continued marginalization and poor collaboration with the public, monetization, and the pitfalls of data universalism.

Current concentrations of data power, in availability and ownership, lead to inequalities and insecurities with different forms of data related practices. Power over infrastructures and the processes of data creation, collection, access, interpretation, sorting and visualization are exerted through data dispossession and exploitative practices, hinged on data power, to extract profit. Factors such as fundamental ambivalences of data power, the appeal of digital data as producing knowledge about society and social processes leading to a better life, versus the increase in surveillance, inequalities and racism reproduced through digital data, call into question critical data studies perspectives and require new approaches to combat power relations within data practices.

Challenging Data Power

The moral issues and harms arising from the transformation of data into knowledge raises issues like consent, privacy, notice, risk and so on. The exploitation of humans through this process of data possession favours capitalist interests to extract profit. Anchored by data assemblage and the datafication of everyday life, the rise, concentration and power of big data in society has lead to new research and challenges of data power and its sociotechnical and political relations. As data driven technologies mediate and guide experience through spaces, encounters with data have the ability to shape and produce consumer response. This expression of data power can influence well-being, create alienating experiences of data as predatory and unequal and unfairly regulate access. For example, Big Brother, an expression used to demonstrate the states ability to enforce forms of disciplinary control, is enabled through datafication and mediated through unequal systems, backed in data practices and algorithms, that guide user experience by sorting, profiling and controlling behaviour.

Data activism is the practical application of data ethics and justice, whereby this expression of countering data politics acknowledges the value and utility of data but aims to resist, challenge and oppose data power, seeking to enact counter strategies that assert data rights, and limit and prevent harm. Examples of social action and data activism include hackathons, civic hacking, crowdsourced projects, data operatives, and citizen science where dominant narratives are reworked to challenge, raise public awareness and offer alternative solutions.

The Data Power Conferences, held in 2015, 2017 and 2019 discussed data power, in relation to governmental deployment, agency and autonomy, and its in/securities. In these conferences, experts in the field developed a main thesis that stated if new perspectives for critical data studies were to be developed, the starting point would be the ambivalences of data power to understand its permeation in society and mechanisms effective in challenging its influence.