Data Justice and COVID-19: Global Perspectives

How this book can help

For teaching and learning in various academic and applied disciplines

As a ref point for activists and analysts interested in data governance, data protection in emergencies, function creep, technosolutionism, technology theatre, crisis entrepreneuralism, PPP, and legitimate intervention.

The pandemic has amplified a nascent epidemiological turn in digital surveillance— 1) function creep and 2) market-making

This book interrogates both COVID-19 tech and the political, legal, and regulatory structures that determine how they are applied.

What effects is the current global state of emergency having on the relationship between tech and authority?

Questions that were asked to the contributors

questions

What is the effect of the intensity of global attention to the emergency?

Function creep: when governments and tech vendors have pushed the repurposing of existing systems to track, predict, and influence.

Market-making: mobile apps to support contact tracing. The linkages between digital contact tracing and surveillance capitalism.

A different scale or acceleration of existing trends?

This book exposed the workings of the state technological power to critical assessment and contestation!!!

Who are the points of articulation of facilitating actors for these developments?

Are we seeing new trends?

And who are the winners and losers in these changes?

The contributors examine and test the linkages between the state of emergency and the use of power.

questions

Technology theatre and seizure

commentary

Politicians are using the pandemic to redistribute power and serve their interests, where near every dispatch point to expand surveillance powers through COVID-19 apps.

The pandemic have heavily penalised poverty, marginalisation and invisibility, and technology does not solve any of these in the absence of broader moves to provide justice.

Multiple factors influence how these technologies are experienced. Accountability, rhetorics of collectivism, the need to signal belonging, and perceptions of individual risk and potential advantage ALL play a role on how ppl engage with the tech.

The true legitimacy for any govt is whether it can convince its people to do something difficult together. COVID-19 response, where the virus has exposed how divided our societies are, can be the litmus test.

84 countries (mentioned in the book) have declared domestic emergencies, granting them all exceptional powers.Emergencies are the perfect storm for exploitation.

The biggest driver of the virus spread is not the virus per se, but struck ion areas that lacked credible leadership.

Does the application of new monitoring and analytic tech change relations of power between authorities and people, or merely amplifying existing relations?

What inequalities does the application of new, or repurposed technologies, make visible?

The tech we built for surveillance yesterday has been retooled and redeployed for COVID-19 biosurveillance!!!

What responses do we see in terms of solidarity, cooperation, or resistance?

The deployment of a technology is a proxy for a seizure of power.

Data technologies both reflect and construct justice and injustice, where the pandemic has exacerbated many existing problems of technology and justice.

Problems such as technosolutionism, the thinness of the legitimacy of tech intervention, excessive public attention on elaborate yet ineffective procedures in the absence of nuanced political response, and the reproduction of power and information asymmetries

During emergencies, we typically suspend a number of the checks placed on public auth, and limit and reduce functions of administrative agencies, esp those that serve public and political ends (e.g. Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine)