Data relations can operate through brute necessity with zero consent.

Evidence

Sometimes there is no consent to data relations at all, just brute necessity. One example is when people wear a sensor or tracker, on order of their employer, as they move around their work space. Another example is when, as in China’s Xianjiang province in February 2017, the government banned petrol sales to anyone without GPS tracking installed in his or her car. The logical limit of consent is when—as is increasingly common in China today—paying for transactions or just walking around public space involves facial recognition by algorithmically enhanced tracking systems linked to national databases. The development of systems that manage these barely consensual relations is a growth area: the Beijing company Face ++ was valued at $1.5 billion before its latest fund-raising from the Chinese and Russian sovereign wealth funds. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 138

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘spiral’ model of escalating, consent-free surveillance is a strong organizing image for an essay on how consent models fail.
• XREF: Connects to surveillance-state literature and to debates over whether data colonialism is a private-platform or state phenomenon. — connects to: Only legal compulsion can force access to prediction data — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1544; Bodily-data extraction without consent has deep historical precedent. — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 3378

Broader Connections

• Only legal compulsion can force access to prediction data #contradicts (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1544
• Bodily-data extraction without consent has deep historical precedent. #expands (0.75) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 3378