'Decolonizing Privacy Studies' by
Payal Arora in (2018)
Television and New Media comments
This paper calls for an epistemic disobedience in privacy studies by decolonizing the approach to privacy. As technology companies expand their reach worldwide, the notion of privacy continues to be viewed through an ethnocentric lens. It disproportionately draws from empirical evidence on Western-based, white, and middle-class demographics. We need to break away from the market-driven neoliberal ideology and the Development paradigm long dictating media studies if we are to foster more inclusive privacy policies. This paper offers a set of propositions to de-naturalize and estrange data from demographic generalizations and cultural assumptions, namely, (1) predicting privacy harms through the history of social practice, (2) recalibrating the core-periphery as evolving and moving targets, and (3) de-exoticizing “natives” by situating privacy in ludic digital cultures. In essence, decolonizing privacy studies is as much an act of reimagining people and place as it is of dismantling essentialisms that are regurgitated through scholarship.
Arora goes on to state
Privacy studies is in its heyday. What was once on the fringes of multiple disciplines is now centerfold and for good reason. Innovations such as social media, ubiquitous computing, mobile platforms, and smart technologies are increasingly datafying our lives. Big data analytics capitalizes on these massive datasets to address previously intractable problems across wide-ranging fields including health care, education, retail, and banking. While this has yielded enormous benefits for the state and the market, it has alarmingly come at the cost of privacy (Cohen 2012).
This has led to the burgeoning of studies from diverse disciplines in the last decade to gauge what privacy is “worth” to individuals (Acquisti et al. 2013; Heikkilä 2018; Kokolakis 2017). Implicit in this body of research is the notion of privacy as a currency, as a rational trade-off, and as an exchange value to enable policy makers, legal scholars, and businesses to estimate how much customers care about the protection of their personal data. Privacy studies has come to be dominated by this capitalistic worldview. Privacy as a value is subsumed by market logic. This is embedded in the prevailing “dataism” ideology of objectivity arising from the quantification of our social behavior, revealing insights into our personal lives (van Dijck 2014).
In recent years, a number of scholars have sounded the alarm on the mythologies perpetuated by big data claims, and the normalizing of the “privacy rich” and “privacy poor” divides in access, management, ethics, representation, and interpretation (Arora 2016; Boyd and Crawford 2012; Couldry and Powell 2014; Milan and Trere 2017a; Pasquale 2015). There is a demand to estrange data from demographic generalizations and question underlying cultural assumptions, providing privacy its “contextual integrity” (Nissenbaum 2009). Of particular concern are the new forms of discrimination emerging through predictive data analytics, marginalizing the already vulnerable subjects of society (Leurs and Shepherd 2017). Studies on privacy harms through datafication such as racial profiling and policing (Noble 2018), biometric surveillance in the postcolonial context (Arora 2016), and state automation of welfare systems (Eubanks 2018), have pushed this agenda further.
At the heart of this momentum is a call to recognize the deeply structured, essentializing and historically reproduced power asymmetries within social and technical norms, knowledge, values, and infrastructures and counter this by pushing forward the notion of the “South” as “resistance, subversion and creativity as responses to situations of marginalization of various kinds” (Milan and Trere 2017b). This essay responds to this call, particularly on the sidelining of the Global South as it pertains to privacy studies.
