Review of Hintz, Dencik, and Wahl-Jorgensen's Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society
2019; Surveillance Studies Network; Volume: 17; Issue: 3/4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.13496
ISSN1477-7487
Autores Tópico(s)E-Government and Public Services
ResumoIn our research community, the citizen's digital agency is met with healthy skepticism.At the nexus of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019), surveillance culture (Lyon 2017), and surveillance realism (Dencik and Cable 2017)-an intersecting place propagated by an increasingly closed Internet coding infrastructure (Lessig 2006)-resistance seems futile.So much so, that the notion of even masking one's location and identity is perhaps more performative than pragmatic (Monahan 2015).In a world of rhizomes in which governments piggyback corporations to monitor populations, what exactly does agency look like, and is it possible to reason this way inside the conventional intellectual confines of digital citizenship scholarship?The day I began this review is the day Mozilla announced Track THIS!It is one of a dozen initiatives undertaken by the company to position users to have more control over the who, what, and how of their data.This latest initiative combines education about which companies are mining data from cookies inside their devices, along with a strategy for stopping it.As social scientists, we have suspected cookie technologies to be highly problematic for user privacy (Shah and Kesan 2009;McStay 2012; Lyon 2015; Cooke 2016) -suspicious for a long time, indeed (Bennett 2001; Haggerty and Gazso 2002;Elmer 2003).And we have remained healthily skeptical about the extents of resisting them.But here is Track THIS!, a technology that opens one hundred browsing tabs at once.In doing so, it gives cookies poor ingredients: noisy metadata.It makes the user appear to be someone they are not.Is the premise of resistance technology naïve, or is it meaningful in the context of agency?Do these questions even matter if the privacy ship set sail long ago?
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