Social Injustice in Surveillance

                 We all have to fight injustice, so if you know about any human rights violation or privacy violation, record. We can't allow violations and injustices remain unpunished, even more when they are systematically and repeatedly done, affecting many victims, democracy, the rule of law, etc. This post is a summary of the article with the incomplete title above published at   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326613806_Social_Injustice_in_Surveillance_Capitalism

                 The digital platforms of the web, retail and e-commerce, mobile telecommunications, and smart infrastructure systems produce vast amounts of detailed data about users, their preferences as consumers, their spatial and temporal patterns and behaviours, their hopes, beliefs, and desires. Huge economic value is generated for the corporations that control these digital architectures since the data are produced without financial compensation to users. The use of personal data in advertising, strategic marketing, and client management is nothing new, however a new era of personal data analytics is upon us, defined by a new logic of accumulation that Shoshana Zuboff has called 'surveillance capitalism'. Knowability and visibility in surveillance is wildly asymmetrical however, power is sharply concentrated in the hands of the small number of companies and data brokers. Long recognized by surveillance scholars as a primary mechanism for social manipulation and control in the information age. Yet, early warnings about the harms of data surveillance at the dawn of the information age have thus far failed to result in sufficient public awareness or the development of satisfactory laws and regulations to counter the threats. This paper draws on normative political theory to demonstrate how these practices are specifically threats to social justice, towards an expanded conceptual vocabulary for challenging the range of potential harms that can occur when people and their data are separated. The rapid acceleration of surveillance has been enabled by exploitative agreements between data subjects and controllers, in which the data subjects have no ability to negotiate the terms of the agreement and often insufficient knowledge of the full extent or legalities of personal data collection and use. Public knowledge and concern about threats to privacy and data security are growing. Privacy is an internationally protected human right, providing a foundation for freedoms such as freedom of speech and freedom of association, and is thus a unifying narrative in democratic societies and a key concept invoked to challenge escalating practices of dataveillance. In addition to privacy harms, corporate personal data practices also threaten a diverse range of intersecting values and rights including autonomy, fairness, equality, democratic sovereignty, and property. The initial injustice of personal data maldistribution can lead to sociocultural misrecognition, which occurs when personal data are subjectto algorithmic processing and classification, as well as political misrepresentation, which renders people voiceless to challenge any misuse of their personal data. In identifying the injustices of specific practices inherent to the current mode, the paper calls for more explicit conceptual development of the social impacts of dataveillance, and attends to the requirements needed to intervene in these practices, which could reconfigure data as an agent of social equality rather than oppression. Nancy Fraser suggests that decentring the erstwhile 'what' of justice enables non-economic forms of injustice to be rendered visible, providing the possibility of broader, multivalent understandings of justice. The problem is that a stable framework is required to enable diverse justice claims to be recognized and addressed, but when the 'what', 'who', and 'how' are in dispute, overcoming injustice is immensely more challenging. This understanding of justice provides the basis for recognizing heterogeneous justice claims and the means to overcome injustice through the identification and removal of obstacles that prevent some individuals from participating as equals in social life. Fraser considers three obstacles to parity of participation that can serve as focal points for social justice struggle. The first obstacle, maldistribution, the second obstacle, misrecognition and the third obstacle, misrepresentation, that occurs when political subjects are not able to control their own representation or when voiceless subjects are unable to access democratic institutions. Beyond the growing concerns about state surveillance or the loss of sensitive personal details in data, the inability of data subjects to access their personal data creates significant injustices of maldistribution in which corporations are able to accumulate vast stockpiles of economically valuable personal data. Injustices of personal data maldistribution are enable further injustices of sociocultural misrecognition via algorithmic data processing, classification, and predictive analytics. The initial injustice of maldistribution is also leading to further injustices of misrepresentation, and the focus here, exposes meta-political injustices which, arises when a polity's boundaries are drawn in such a way as to wrongly exclude some people from the chance to participate in its authorized contests over justice. A rapidly accelerating phase of capitalism based on asymmetrical personal data accumulation poses significant concerns for democratic societies. A diverse range of economic, social, political and legal consequences must be fully interrogated, yet the frameworks for challenging practices of corporate dataveillance are underdeveloped. This article has argued that the recent, surprising acceleration of surveillance capitalism situates these personal data practices as important threats to social justice. This article draws on Nancy Fraser's theory of abnormal justice to make explicit how three core data practices inherent to surveillance should be viewed as threats to parity of participation in social life, and therefore targets of social justice reparations. This article illustrates how asymmetrical accumulation of personal data leads to injustices. This data maldistribution then lays the foundation for further injustices to take place. Recognizing the focused nature of this account of social harms specific to corporate personal data practices, there is clearly a need for more conceptual development of the threats of dataveillance as well as empirical research that exposes further examples of unjust data practices occurring within the broader assemblage of state and corporate surveillance. A focus on data justice is also of high priority, due to the inequalities baked directly into data. A central objective here should be to provide data subjects with ownership or at least meaningful access to their data as a necessary first step towards addressing the lag in social evolution, which has enabled the surveillance capitalists to normalize asymmetrical data accumulation and conduct further unjust data practices under cover of secrecy and under the protection of out-dated legal frameworks.