Distributed commercial data collection is structurally opaque and hard to contest
Evidence
For subjects who interact with it, the social quantification sector’s actions are extraordinarily complex, highly distributed, massively comprehensive, continuously updated, and, for these reasons, almost entirely opaque. Social quantification is contestable by individuals or groups only with the greatest difficulty. This is the challenge of “the black box society,” in which, as legal scholar Frank Pasquale puts it, “the spaces of our common life that are supposed to be the most open and transparent are being colonized by the logic of secrecy.” — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 389
Categorization
- XREF: Pasquale’s ‘black box society’ is a bridge to the attention/surveillance school’s account of invisibility and asymmetry of platform power. — connects to: Sharing’s semantic unboundedness masks the corporate capture of data — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 514; Opaque data systems are arbitrary because their goals cannot be reflexively integrated — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 521; Large-scale health-data aggregation can escape existing legal medical protections — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 529 (+8 more)
Broader Connections
- Corporate rationality masks everyday data extraction as routine business rather than appropriation
#expands(0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 101 - Individual data-rights enforcement cannot succeed without collective action
#complicates(0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1548 - Privately controlled data extraction produces social classifications that entrench inequality
#expands(0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 443 - Large bureaucracies risk isolated, forgotten information across distributed units
#expands(0.72)