Rethinking Privacy: A Feminist Approach to Privacy Rights after Snowden

Privacidad en un mundo digital. Comentario a Carissa Véliz, Privacy is power: why and how you should take back control of your data

“…Una crítica a la economía digital conforme con las teorías críticas con la visión liberal del ámbito privado, construido sobre la ficción del sujeto abstracto soberano, no debe plantearse como forma de vigilancia y discriminación de una esfera que de otro modo sería autónoma e igualitaria. Del mismo modo que la economía de datos oculta la falta de soberanía de los usuarios del entorno digital, que están subordinados por su desigual capacidad de controlar acciones y decisiones respecto de quienes dominan el tratamiento de datos agregados, la esfera privada, en sus diversas dimensiones, oculta relaciones de dependencia que impiden también hablar de sujetos soberanos y aislados (Weinberg, 2017). El ideal liberal de una vida privada, como desarrollo más adelante, no sirve para proteger a las personas de formas de dominación vinculadas a la privacidad.…”

The Urban Data Justice Case Study Collection

“…However, rights-based framings of privacy have also been critiqued by feminists for starting from the perspective of an individualised subject with bargaining power (Allen, 2011). Individualisation has the potential to invisibilise the web of power and social relations which mediate decision-making for women across the global South, including about their own bodies (Weinberg, 2017). Kovacs (2017), while critiquing surveillance through the lens of gender, invokes Lyon (2003) in arguing for a shift from the individual rights-based framing of privacy to that of social justice, since surveillance is a "structural" rather than "individual" problem.…”

Constitutive Surveillance and Social Media

“…Weinberg notes, 'A privacy rights framework risks reducing the totality of the digital economy and its attending conditions of exploitation to a matter of individual rights rather than a social condition' (2017: 16). Weinberg (2017) highlights how an individualised concept of privacy has been regularly and selectively appropriated by corporations in order to appear -hypocritically -to have users' privacy in their interests. Following the San Bernadino, California terrorist attack in December of 2015, Apple refused the FBI's demands to produce a program that could hack an iPhone belonging to one of the attackers, because such a program would render all iPhone users vulnerable.…”