Many thanks to Javier Duran and the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry for allowing Ben Muller the time and space to see this project to fruition. 2 Ben Muller brought the different authors together and edited the collective article. Muller, Benjamin et al.
Digital privacy tends to be understood as the "top-down" regulation and control of personal information on the behalf of corporate and governmental institutions, realized through various policies and practices. While smartphone manufacturers increasingly innovate and alter their policies and practices to reflect new and ongoing cyber challenges, they tend to emphasize the protection of personal information in the form of content data. On the other hand, there is metadata: the measurements and math of content data. Abundant and ubiquitous in their discrete movements, they are the most precious commodity in the world of big data mobile analytics. Smartphone metadata are also one of the most pressing privacy concerns precisely because it is exceedingly difficult to see, study, and analyze. However, there is another realm through which digital privacy exists: a realm where the inability to see and study metadata is unacceptable. This entirely differently realm is comprised of jailbreakers-a network of hacktivist programmers injecting software-based "tweaks" into Apple mobile devices in ways that reveal metadata to users and allow users to control them. By doing so, jailbreakers allow users to build previously unrealized relationships with metadata and thereby radically distinguishing "top-down" Digital Privacy from "bottom-up" digital privacy. Although Apple has routinely resisted jailbreaking citing fears over device instability, user security vulnerability, and Terms of Use violations, this article reveals that many key privacy-first jailbreaking tweaks undermine Apple's ability to monopolize metadata flows. Theorised through a cybernetic governmentality, this intervention demonstrates the extents to which Apple goes to reify its profit-first vision of information protection, one which insulates many metadata flows from its users. Through this theoretical approach, we as analysts can critically glean awareness of the politics of the (in)visibility and (il)legibility of metadata and the role they play in the discourse on digital, mobile data protection.
In 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 (
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