Privacy fixes leave intact data science’s silence about capitalism

Evidence

To be fair, Pentland cares about data privacy and has developed an “Open Personal Data Store” that separates the sending of information for authentication purposes from the underlying private data that enables authentication, hopefully minimizing risks of reidentification. But what matters more are the silences built into Pentland’s redefinition of social science. He says nothing about the close connections between ubiquitous data collection and the new direction of capitalism, and he says little about the familiar ways of understanding the social that this new “social physics” casts into permanent shadow. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 433

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘silences built into a redefinition’ move echoes the book’s earlier framing and the broader critical-technical-studies axiom that technical fixes can obscure political-economic questions. — connects to: Privacy law’s negative liberty tradition conflicts with capitalism’s data extraction drive. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 549