Review of Hintz, Dencik, and Wahl-Jorgensen's Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society

Abstract

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 (