27/10/2021
Our video ‘What Feminism Can Teach Us about Consent in the Age of Embodied Data’ shows us how as a , you are often introduced to a notice before gaining access to a service or an application.
https://youtu.be/iOnAPZtblvU
This notice could be to inform you about the data the company will be collecting while you are using their services, a change in the policy, or that your data will be sold to third-party applications.
Companies are mandated to acquire your , but do the current consent frameworks create a environment where you feel like you’re in to decide freely what happens with your data?
For those of us who read through the fine print, we often find that we do not have the to with any part of the notice, or worse—we may not understand what’s been asked of us.
And yet, we provide our consent to avoid the deprivation of digital participation. This begrudging nod of approval, which was supposed to serve as a data protection tool, ends up compromising our autonomy. The mindset behind data usage is problematic.
We look at data as a to be mined. In doing so, we reduce it to a —purely transactional. However, our data bodies are far from these inanimate and ineffectual beings that this mindset makes it out to be.
Our data is increasingly being used in -making that affects our physical . And therefore, flawed consent regimes allow whoever has access to our data to control our bodies and their actions.
How do we strengthen consent regimes to reclaim control over our data, and thereby our bodies? How do we address the current imbalance between us users and the people who seek our consent to use our data?
Therefore, it is only appropriate to draw upon feminist theories that insist consent and autonomy are embedded in power relations. Feminism has identified that each of us cannot give consent equally.
In a world with increasingly close entanglements between our bodies and our data, we need to create a safe environment for people to give consent without fear of or .
Addressing the power imbalance would require us to investigate how data is collected, how it is used, and what special provisions and we need to put in place to populations.
Only by doing this can we address the imbalance and ensure our data is used to us rather than us.
Watch our video here: https://youtu.be/iOnAPZtblvU
To know more, read our working paper titled ‘Informed Consent - Said Who? A Feminist Perspective on Principles of Consent in the Age of Embodied Data’ by Anja Kovacs and Tripti Jain from Internet Democracy.
Link to the working paper: https://bit.ly/2ZnWMyH
