Hey there! Let’s talk about something that greatly impacts our lives – privacy and digital rights. I know, I know, it’s not exactly a fun Friday night topic. But hear me out because this is important stuff that deserves more attention than it gets, especially for certain groups in society. We’re all using digital technologies more and more nowadays for everything such ascommunication, work, education, entertainment, you name itand with that increased digital existence comes many amazing conveniences and connections. But it also means we’re generating massive amounts of data about ourselves through our online activities and leaving digital trails everywhere we virtually go (Goggin et al., 2017).
Now, when it comes to privacy issues and how that data gets collected, shared, analyzed and used. A lot of the mainstream discussion tends to make it seem like a pretty universal thing. Privacy advocates raise the alarm about government surveillance, corporate data mining, and eroding our civil liberties in the digital age (Goggin et al., 2017). Those are valid and important concerns that impact everyone. But here’s something I don’t think gets highlighted enough: the privacy challenges and vulnerabilities digital technologies create don’t affect all population segments equally (Bélanger & Crossler, 2011). Certain marginalized groups face double, triple, or more layers of privacy risks, harms, and barriers that the mainstream privacy discourse often doesn’t fully capture or address.
Think about it, vulnerable minorities who already experience discrimination, surveillance, profiling, and data exploitation in the online world can be particularly disempowering and carry much higher stakes. Domestic violence victims trying to escape abuse, refugees navigating borders, racial minorities already subjected to overpolicing, LGBTQ+ individuals in repressive region. For all these groups, privacy isn’t just about a few targeted ads or some NSA spying program (Goggin et al., 2017). It can be a matter of safety, freedom, and survival sometimes. It’s not just about identifiable marginalized groups either. There are also whole segments of the population that are largely overlooked in how we frame and understand privacy issues based on assumptions of the “typical user” or privacy subject (Stuart et al., 2019). Like low income people whose data gets vacuumed up in welfare databases and client monitoring systems. Or elderly people who may not be as tech savvy but still have sensitive health data floating around(Goggin et al., 2017). Or rural communities that get caught up in big data systems built around urban environments.
Now, when it comes to privacy issues and how that data gets collected, shared, analyzed and used. A lot of the mainstream discussion tends to make it seem like a pretty universal thing. Privacy advocates raise the alarm about government surveillance, corporate data mining, and eroding our civil liberties in the digital age (Goggin et al., 2017). Those are valid and important concerns that impact everyone. But here’s something I don’t think gets highlighted enough: the privacy challenges and vulnerabilities digital technologies create don’t affect all population segments equally (Bélanger & Crossler, 2011). Certain marginalized groups face double, triple, or more layers of privacy risks, harms, and barriers that the mainstream privacy discourse often doesn’t fully capture or address.
Think about it, vulnerable minorities who already experience discrimination, surveillance, profiling, and data exploitation in the online world can be particularly disempowering and carry much higher stakes. Domestic violence victims trying to escape abuse, refugees navigating borders, racial minorities already subjected to overpolicing, LGBTQ+ individuals in repressive region. For all these groups, privacy isn’t just about a few targeted ads or some NSA spying program (Goggin et al., 2017). It can be a matter of safety, freedom, and survival sometimes. It’s not just about identifiable marginalized groups either. There are also whole segments of the population that are largely overlooked in how we frame and understand privacy issues based on assumptions of the “typical user” or privacy subject (Stuart et al., 2019). Like low income people whose data gets vacuumed up in welfare databases and client monitoring systems. Or elderly people who may not be as tech savvy but still have sensitive health data floating around(Goggin et al., 2017). Or rural communities that get caught up in big data systems built around urban environments.
The Importance of Centering Indigenous Data Sovereignty in Privacy Discussions
When we talk about privacy in a uniform way, we risk overlooking all the different situated experiences and power dynamics around digital technologies based on race, gender, class, age, abilities, and other intersecting factors. This matters because how we understand privacy shapes what gets recognized as privacy violations, what gets prioritized as ethical concerns, and what regulatory solutions get proposed (Goggin et al., 2017). Let me give you a current example to illustrate what I mean: Indigenous data sovereignty. This is a major emerging issue around the rights of Indigenous peoples globally to maintain control and governance over data about their communities, lands, cultures, and ways of life (Stuart et al., 2019). You’ve got all these data collection projects from governments, corporations, and researchers that gather data about Indigenous populations.
For Indigenous groups worldwide, debates around digital rights and data governance feed into historical power imbalances rooted in centuries of colonialism and disempowerment. Their ability to protect what data gets collected about their communities and how it gets used is fundamentally tied to being able to exercise sovereignty over their peoples, cultures, and lands in an increasingly digital age (Nissenbaum, 2018). Yet, indigenous populations with such special challenges never seem to get centered in the general narrative of data issues, which, forthe most part, are dominated by the conversations that revolve around the consumer rights of individuals and perspectives informed by the Global North. It is mostly the stereotypical stance of privacy scholars, advocates, and policymakers to look at data subjects as “white, middle class, American or European users.” This view may make us lose sight of the distinct case of many ethnic and cultural minorities for whom hardship of surveillance and exploration are the things right at their doorstep, while they are still fighting for their compensation for the past stripping (Nissenbaum, 2018). The effort does not address how data regimes online perpetuate colonial structures that have had and for long will have negative implications for data sovereignty and Native self-determination.
We want to know how to solve this problem. Thus, such conversations about privacy and data governance must be steered far from privileged perspectives, which have usually been a norm to be considered as the frame coping by default. We will not do well by looking only at the possible ways of technology but rather at the actual ones facing very poor peopleand those who are very rich. Privacy experts and advocates should take the struggle away from token confrontations with systemic private data harassment towards directly engaging with hindering factors and historical injustices (Nissenbaum, 2018).The resultant theory means that Indigenous perspectives, concepts, and voices that provide data collective rights must be uplifted to enable them to challenge the individualistic colonial ideologies wired in many data protection regulations. A proper data residents’ governance framework will involve genuine cooperativeness with the aboriginal nations and communities in rights based agreements following the laws and principles of indigenous people’s governance. It is only in a genuinely colonialist approach that we can begin to grapple with the distinct bias and data insecurity that are found in Indigenous people’s digital experience.
Towards a Pluralistic and Participatory Approach to Digital Privacy Governance
This, therefore, involves purposefully finding and bringing the unheard voices and opinions of the marginalized people whom the norm has discredited through the circulations. It is an important cognitive ability to align with the specific social contexts that define the actual experiences and realities that show how disparities in the digital privacy realm, which abound across racial, gender, citizenship statuses, economic backgrounds, and other issues contribute to social stratification, manifest (Nissenbaum, 2018). Privacy is not the only issue of single consumer goods, but broader concepts of collective rights, rights of groups, cultural rights, and rights of people in their collective will and tendency against domination and discrimination will have to be involved in the process (Stuart et al., 2019). Hence, it implies opening up the range of significance that should be contained in the discourse of secrecy issues, not only restricting the major narratives of capital exploitation and governmental surveillance, which are the most popular ones. It is conceivable that even the “not so” civic uses of digital systems can bear an outsize role in certain groups’ privacy or impact the living conditions of targeted social groups disproportionately (Karppinen, 2017). Thus, it is important to develop a conceptual model that enables us to address the impact of digital systems on marginalized people more effectively.
Therefore, we have to go on to have a higher tolerance to different perspectives in our research and assessment of digital privacy issues and to be reflected in more complex policymaking. We can’t just regard privacy as a judging individual by a link of rules and standards which is the same in every case. Equity and justice are the foundations of an effective governance system, which ensures that suitable measures are in place to assist and safeguard more vulnerable population groups that have been rendered at higher risk due to their historical injustice or power imbalances, among other factors. This process could go through the law system organized around collective privacy rights and the idea of cultural data, not only individual rights drawn with a Western liberal view (Karppinen, 2017). Whether in the form of self-determined data protection standards that include robust privacy and self-determination frameworks for Indigenous groups or something else. More broadly, it is very important to introduce much more participatory solutions aimed at the communities that directly impact the shaping of the privacy rules, indexes, and solutions that will cover digital lives(Karppinen, 2017). It is just the mixing of the pluralistic approach to privacy – a kind of one that places power in the center of marginal people – that could form the cornerstone of the relevant governance model that would be shared equally among all the society.
This is not easy, but we strive very much to turn a corner and develop more fair and inclusive ideas that can be used to protect data privacy rights (Becker, 2019). This is vital as every day, our lives are governed more and more by technologies that consume excessive amounts of data. A few big corporate and government entities control these technologies (Karppinen, 2017). Through communication and collaboration, jointly driving sustainable development is the URL we’re navigating toward, not the closed mindedness, centralized scientific orchestration with unaccompanied policy making. Sustained community rooted activism alongside joint struggle of the marginalized groups globally comprises the main drive point to achieve digital equality (Karppinen, 2017). The pressure of the community upon those who draw the rules for the digital world is the most relentless and strongest driving force.
I know that I’ve given you a lot to think about thus far, but I wished to present you with the opening into some of the large, crucial debates happening about who ought to be prioritized or ds who might have their rights regularly overlooked when it comes to the governance of privacy and digital rights. It’s an enormous topic devoid of easy solutions, which is vital owing to its multifaceted effects on everybody in various ways, almost universally, because of the underlying data extraction process associated with it.
Rethinking Privacy and Digital Rights Through an Intersectional Lens
Shielding personal information was an enormous challenge even during the classic century before the digital age. But in this age of all encompassing data collection, fully integrated decisionmaking systems, and the overwhelming power of the digital platforms that command immense social and economic authority, getting personal data rights right and building up strong accountability systems will undoubtedly be among the most important issues of not only preserving the fundamental human rights but also that of creating the environment that isquite promising to the modernization of democracy it is not a small task, however, which explains why it is so critical and therefore particularly important to be done (Becker, 2019).
So, in that case, I would advise you to continue to question your thoughts and research yourself heuristically on the root cause. Search for background and thoughts from people and groups that are way out of the typical TIC and standard privacy circles, Keeping in mind the driving force of privacy as the enabler of human rights through the perspective of marginalized populations (Millett et al., 2007). And fiercely probe: who gets continuously overlooked, marginalized, or deliberately victimized as we whip up to realize the disruptive technology each day?
When considering privacy and digital rights, it will readily appear that they aren’t in any vacuum area. They rather coexist with and are governed by other shortcomings of society, such as the existing inequities in gender, class, and ethnicity, among other issues. What is needed, therefore, to thoughtfully secure them for everyone is an explicit ongoing public conversation, innovative revisions to their design frameworks, and to ensure that they remain consistently communal, entrepreneurial, and collective (Marwick & Boyd, 2019). It is among the great political projects that remain objective in the infant 21st century digital age, requiring us to provide the right outlook for thefuture.
In general, certain marginalized groups face double, triple,or more layers of privacy risks, harms, and barriers that the mainstream privacy discourse often doesn’t fully capture or address. When we talk about privacy in a uniform way, we risk overlooking all the different situated experiences and power dynamics around digital technologies based on race, gender, class, age, abilities, and other intersecting factors (Marwick & Boyd, 2019). For Indigenous groups worldwide, debates around digital rights and data governance feed into historical power imbalances rooted in centuries of colonialism and disempowerment. Privacy experts and advocates should take the struggle away from token confrontations with systemic private data harassment towards directly engaging with hindering factors and historical injustices. We can’t just regard privacy as a judging individual by a link of rules and standards which is the same in every case.
Becker, M. (2019). Privacy in the digital age: comparing and contrasting individual versus social approaches towards privacy. Ethics and Information Technology, 21(4), 307-317.
Bélanger, F., & Crossler, R. E. (2011). Privacy in the digital age: a review of information privacy research in information systems. MIS quarterly, 1017-1041.
Goggin, G., Vromen, A., Weatherall, K., Martin, F., Webb, A., Sunman, L., Bailo, F. (2017) Executive Summary and Digital Rights: What are they and why do they matter now? In Digital Rights in Australia. Sydney: University of Sydney. https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/17587.
Karppinen, K. (2017) Human rights and the digital. In Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights. In H. Tumber & S. Waisbord (eds) Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge pp 95-103.
Marwick, A. & boyd, d. (2019) ‘Understanding Privacy at the Margins: Introduction’, International Journal of Communication, pp. 1157-1165.
Millett, L. I., Lin, H. S., & Waldo, J. (Eds.). (2007). Engaging privacy and information technology in a digital age. National Academies Press.
Nissenbaum, H. (2018). Respecting context to protect privacy: Why meaning matters. Science and Engineering Ethics, 24(3), 831-852.
Stuart, A., Bandara, A. K., & Levine, M. (2019). The psychology of privacy in the digital age. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 13(11), e12507.
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