Data Governance Network

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

How do we pick the stocks we buy? How does new impact our attention and behaviour? Terrance Odean joins VasantDhar in episode 23 of the to share his learnings over a lifetime of studying behavioural .

Tune in:

Episode 23: Terry Odean on How to Think about Investing | Brave New World  How do we pick the stocks we buy? What drives us to sell? How does new technology impact our attention and behavior? Terrance Odean joins Vasant Dhar in…

In the latest episode of , our host Vasant Dhar interviews Dina Srinivasan on the dangers of with companies such as and having an enormous amount of market power - and the steps needed to tackle this issue.

Episode 22: Dina Srinivasan on the Dangers of Big Tech | Brave New World  Google and Facebook have an outrageous amount of market power, and that's dangerous for society. Dina Srinivasan joins Vasant Dhar in episode 22 of Brave New…

In this policy brief, Rishab bailey, Faiza Rahman and Vrinda Bhandari from NIPFP examine the anonymity debate and its applicability to the online context.

The authors analyse three interrelated pillars - speech, privacy and equality. Furthermore, they used the analysis to examine the recently introduced Intermediary Liabilities Rules, 2021 related to voluntarily verification of users and traceability of originators.

They argue that although anonymity is not a design feature of the Internet itself, the difficulty in establishing real-world identities of online users is considered one of the primary factors driving the increase in online offences.

Hence, to know more read:

DGN Policy Brief 14: Examining the Online Anonymity Debate: How far should the law go in mandating user identification?