Grindr? it's a "Blackmailer's goldmine"! The weaponization of queer data publics Amid the US-China trade conflict.

In March 2019, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) identified Grindr, a hookup app that predominantly caters to men who have sex with men, as a "national security threat" and compelled the Chinese conglomerate Kunlun Tech to divest from it entirely. The CFIUS-Grindr ruling is indicative of larger regulatory debates over increasing datafication trends in the dating app industry. Through a political economy approach to communication, this paper examines how this ruling was predominantly constructed by various stakeholders as a public controversy in light of the ongoing US-China trade conflict. This interpretation of the controversy relies on a prejudicial trope that construes queer dating app users as vulnerable targets of potential blackmail schemes operated by Chinese intelligence agencies. Through the Lavender Scare, a historical period referring to state-led investigations into the presence of LGBTQ+ employees in Western federal workforces, this paper historicizes this blackmail trope to highlight how the politicization of queer vulnerabilities amid global hegemonic conflicts is a tactic that predates the US-China trade conflict. It argues that the CFIUS-Grindr ruling weaponizes Grindr's queer data publics as threats against which the US government should protect itself, while failing to fully recognize the urgency for the state to protect the data privacy rights of the LGBTQ+ communities in the digital economy. In light of the CFIUS-Grindr ruling, this paper examines the implications that datafication raises for the LGBTQ+ communities whose sexual lives and identities are increasingly being datafied and exploited by digital media platforms.

The techno-politics of computing the mind: Opening the black box of digital psychiatry.

Psychiatry has recently witnessed the launch of digital phenotyping as a new research agenda. According to digital phenotyping's hypothesis, data about a patient's daily behavior can be continuously collected through wearable monitoring devices and used to build software that would send warnings of mental relapse or would tailor treatment choices. The research is exploratory, and the claims upon which it is based are contentious. Drawing on interviews, we followed a research team that aspired to build a digital system that could send such warnings to patients with mental health disorders like depression and epilepsy. This enabled us to learn how a new instrument to measure mental function becomes constructed and what translations take place in this process. Here we pay particular attention to the role of patients as research collaborators. We observed the frictions and debates in the research team between different mental health knowledge regimes, seeing them before they were black-boxed and lost from sight. We aimed to understand how actors anticipate software and data analytics to function alongside physicians and patients, as well as how different accounts reconstitute the 'mental', 'therapy', or the 'social' itself. We discuss several 'dissociations' that occur along the research trajectory regarding: less motivated and underrepresented patients, the role of clinical knowledge derived from patient self-reporting, and the social, political, and economic aspects of a patient's life affecting mental health. In this sense, we want to open the black box of this new behavioral technoscience.

Tracking ambivalence: an existential critique of datafication in the context of chronic pain.

In recent years, data-driven approaches to chronic pain care have increased dramatically. However, people living with chronic pain are ambivalent about datafication practices. Drawing on in-depth interviews with individuals living with chronic pain, I discuss and analyze this ambivalence. On the one hand, participants imbibe the promissory rhetoric of data as that which may organize and control the body in pain. On the other hand, they dismiss and critique the type of data collected. This micro-level analysis of the pain tracking experience illuminates a tension between datafication and chronic pain. Datafication demands that the patient relay information about their body that is free of ambiguity. However, chronic pain is ambiguous and full of paradox. This article illuminates the emotional chasm between datafication enthusiasts and chronic pain patients who track their pain and suggests that such enthusiasm may lead to bad faith.

Socio-ethical challenges and opportunities for advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in digital medicine.

Digitalization in medicine offers a significant opportunity to transform healthcare systems by providing novel digital tools and services to guide personalized prevention, prediction, diagnosis, treatment and disease management. This transformation raises a number of novel socio-ethical considerations for individuals and society as a whole, which need to be appropriately addressed to ensure that digital medical devices (DMDs) are widely adopted and benefit all patients as well as healthcare service providers. In this narrative review, based on a broad literature search in PubMed, Web of Science, Google Scholar, we outline five core socio-ethical considerations in digital medicine that intersect with the notions of equity and digital inclusion: (i) access, use and engagement with DMDs, (ii) inclusiveness in DMD clinical trials, (iii) algorithm fairness, (iv) surveillance and datafication, and (v) data privacy and trust. By integrating literature from multidisciplinary fields, including social, medical, and computer sciences, we shed light on challenges and opportunities related to the development and adoption of DMDs. We begin with an overview of the different types of DMDs, followed by in-depth discussions of five socio-ethical implications associated with their deployment. Concluding our review, we provide evidence-based multilevel recommendations aimed at fostering a more inclusive digital landscape to ensure that the development and integration of DMDs in healthcare mitigate rather than cause, maintain or exacerbate health inequities.

Contested quantification for planetary health - A sociotechnical analysis of Bangladesh's water salinity monitoring infrastructure.

In climate change and planetary health, the datafication of natural processes and their effects on human health is gaining importance, not least due to data's role in international funding mechanisms. In Bangladesh, water salinity has become the focus of much research and could emerge as an asset to access climate funding. Taking Bangladesh's water salinity monitoring infrastructure as a case study, this paper problematizes the "neutrality" of water salinity data. Adopting the methodological approach of an "infrastructural inversion", we foreground the relational nature of data production. The study draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Bangladesh along the data production chain. We highlight how the involvement of a large variety of actors gave rise to vastly different data infrastructures and explicate the influence of actors' "problematization". We further illustrate the importance of pre-existing materiality for the implementation of data collection systems on the ground and their power to influence whose reality is represented and whose is left out. Discussing these findings in the context of the international development sector reveals the complex interplay between the dual function of data as a mediator of knowledge and proof of legitimacy. Attention is paid to the tendencies of perpetuating patterns of exclusion and inclusion through data in a setting of project-based funding. We thereby provide global health researchers, policy makers and development practitioners with a detailed case study whilst stimulating reflection on the hegemony of datafication.

Addressing the Black Box of AI-A Model and Research Agenda on the Co-constitution of Aging and Artificial Intelligence.

Algorithmic technologies and (large) data infrastructures, often referred to as Artificial Intelligence (AI), have received increasing attention from gerontological research in the last decade. Although there is much literature that dissects and explores the development, application, and evaluation of AI relevant to gerontology, this study makes a novel contribution by critically engaging with the theorizing in this growing field of research. We observe that gerontology's engagement with AI is shaped by an interventionist logic that situates AI as a black box for gerontological research. We demonstrate how this black box logic has neglected many aspects of AI as a research topic for gerontology and discuss three classical concepts in gerontology to show how they can be used to open various black boxes of aging and AI in the areas: (a) the datafication of aging, (b) the political economy of AI and aging, and (c) everyday engagements and embodiments of AI in later life. In the final chapter, we propose a model of the co-constitution of aging and AI that makes theoretical propositions to study the relational terrain between aging and AI and hence aims to open the black box of AI in gerontology beyond interventionist logic.

Humanitarian ignorance: towards a new paradigm of non-knowledge in digital humanitarianism.

This paper introduces the notion of 'humanitarian ignorance' to address growing concern regarding non-knowledge, as datafication becomes a central instrument and ambition of the humanitarian sector. With the turn to digital humanitarianism, contemporary humanitarian action increasingly relies on technology-driven quantification to expand the ability to collect, analyse, and present information. Utilising datafication processes, humanitarian organisations seek to assess 'risk' and mitigate 'uncertainty' more efficiently. Although central to their knowledge management and decision-making in low information circumstances, the conceptual notions of 'risk' and 'uncertainty' are inadequate to capture the full spectrum of non-knowledge in a time of digital humanitarianism. We introduce 'humanitarian ignorance' here to challenge the assumption that datafication allows humanitarian organisations to make fully informed, delimited, and thus 'better' decisions. Ultimately, we accentuate the paradox that while datafication is thought to reduce risk and uncertainty in humanitarian affairs by suggesting higher levels of control, insight, and certainty, these efforts in fact open new expanses of ignorance and unknowns.

Data driven or data informed? How general practitioners use data to evaluate their own and colleagues' clinical work in clusters.

In contemporary policy discourses, data are presented as key assets for improving health-care quality: policymakers want health care to become 'data driven'. In this article, we focus on a particular example of this ambition, namely a new Danish national quality development program for general practitioners (GPs) where doctors are placed in so-called 'clusters'. In these clusters, GPs are obliged to assess their own and colleagues' clinical quality with data derived from their own clinics-using comparisons, averages and benchmarks. Based on semi-structured interviews with Danish GPs and drawing on Science and Technology Studies, we explore how GPs understand these data, and what makes them trust-or question-a data analysis. The GPs describe how they change clinical practices based on these discussions of data. So, when and how do data for quality assurance come to influence their perceptions of quality? By exploring these issues, we carve out a role for a sociological engagement with evidence in everyday medical practices. In conclusion, we suggest a need to move from the aim of being data driven to one of being data informed.

The Trouble of Stigma in the Age of Datafication: Screening for Mental Health Issues in a Refugee Camp in Jordan.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a refugee camp in Jordan, this article investigates how datafication through digital screening technologies helps shape mental health issues in the face of widespread uneasiness about the subject, especially among the intended beneficiaries. We argue that the refugees and their health care providers face a dilemma: on the one hand, the desire to make mental health issues visible and clinically actionable through datafication and, on the other hand, the wish to keep mental health issues out of public view to avoid potential stigma.

Infosphere, Datafication, and Decision-Making Processes in the AI Era.

A recent interpretation of artificial intelligence (AI) (Floridi 2013, 2022) suggests that the implementation of AI demands the investigation of the binding conditions that make it possible to build and integrate artifacts into our lived world. Such artifacts can successfully interact with the world because our environment has been designed to be compatible with intelligent machines (such as robots). As the use of AI becomes ubiquitous in society, possibly leading to the formation of increasingly intelligent bio-technological unions, there will likely be a coexistence of a plethora of micro-environments wrapped and tailored around humans and basic robots. The key element of this pervasive process will be the capacity to integrate biological realms in an infosphere suitable for the implementation of AI technologies. This process will require extensive datafication. This is because data is the basis of the logical-mathematical codes and models that drive and guide AI. This process will have huge consequences on workplaces, on workers, as well as on the decision-making processes required for the functioning of future societies. In this paper we will offer a comprehensive reflection on the moral and social implications of datafication as well as a set of considerations about its desirability, which will be informed by the following insights: (1) full protection of privacy may become structurally impossible, thus leading to undesirable forms of political and social control; (2) worker's freedom may be reduced; (3) human creativity, imagination, and even divergence from AI logic might be channeled and possibly discouraged; (4) there will likely be a push towards efficiency and instrumental reason, which will become preeminent in production lines as well as in society.

Barriers and beliefs: a comparative case study of how university educators understand the datafication of higher education systems.

In recent decades, higher education institutions around the world have come to depend on complex digital infrastructures. In addition to registration, financial, and other operations platforms, digital classroom tools with built-in learning analytics capacities underpin many course delivery options. Taken together, these intersecting digital systems collect vast amounts of data from students, staff, and faculty. Educators' work environments-and knowledge about their work environments-have been shifted by this rise in pervasive datafication. In this paper, we overview the ways faculty in a variety of institutional status positions and geographic locales understand this shift and make sense of the datafied infrastructures of their institutions. We present findings from a comparative case study (CCS) of university educators in six countries, examining participants' knowledge, practices, experiences, and perspectives in relation to datafication, while tracing patterns across contexts. We draw on individual, systemic, and historical axes of comparison to demonstrate that in spite of structural barriers to educator data literacy, professionals teaching in higher education do have strong and informed ethical and pedagogical perspectives on datafication that warrant greater attention. Our study suggests a distinction between the understandings educators have of data processes, or technical specifics of datafication on campuses, and their understanding of big picture data paradigms and ethical implications. Educators were found to be far more knowledgeable and comfortable in paradigm discussions than they were in process ones, partly due to structural barriers that limit their involvement at the process level.

Data as symptom: Doctors' responses to patient-provided data in general practice.

People are increasingly able to generate their own health data through new technologies such as wearables and online symptom checkers. However, generating data is one thing, interpreting them another. General practitioners (GPs) are likely to be the first to help with interpretations. Policymakers in the European Union are investing heavily in infrastructures to provide GPs access to patient measurements. But there may be a disconnect between policy ambitions and the everyday practices of GPs. To investigate this, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 Danish GPs. According to the GPs, patients relatively rarely bring data to them. GPs mostly remember three types of patient-generated data that patients bring to them for interpretation: heart and sleep measurements from wearables and results from online symptom checkers. However, they also spoke extensively about data work with patient queries concerning measurements from the GPs' own online Patient Reported Outcome system and online access to laboratory results. We juxtapose GP reflections on these five data types and between policy ambitions and everyday practices. These data require substantial recontextualization work before the GPs ascribe them evidential value and act on them. Even when they perceived as actionable, patient-provided data are not approached as measurements, as suggested by policy frameworks. Rather, GPs treat them as analogous to symptoms-that is to say, GPs treat patient-provided data as subjective evidence rather than authoritative measures. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) literature,we suggest that GPs must be part of the conversation with policy makers and digital entrepreneurs around when and how to integrate patient-generated data into healthcare infrastructures.

Engaging Stigmatised Communities in Australia with Digital Health Systems: Towards Data Justice in Public Health.

Introduction: In 2018, following government policy changes to Australia's national electronic health record system, 'My Health Record', consumer advocates-including organisations representing people living with HIV, people who use drugs and sex workers-raised concerns about privacy and data security. Responding to these controversies, this study explores the practical, ethical and political complexities of engaging stigmatised communities with digital health systems. Methods: We conducted 16 qualitative semi-structured interviews in 2020 with key informants representing communities who experience stigma, discrimination and marginalisation in Australia. These communities included people living with HIV, sex workers, people who inject drugs, gay and bisexual men and transgender and gender diverse people. We conducted a reflexive thematic analysis. Results: Key informants were sceptical of proposed benefits of electronic health records for their communities, and concerned about privacy risks and the potential for discrimination. Meaningful consultation, consent mechanisms and tackling structural stigma were raised as solutions for engaging communities. Conclusions: Although communities could benefit from being included in digital health systems, significant cultural, legal and social reforms from government were believed to be necessary to build trust in digital health systems. We argue that these forms of data justice are necessary for effective future systems. Policy Implications: Engaging stigmatised communities-including in relation to gender, sexuality, sex work, drug use, HIV-requires a commitment to data justice. The design and implementation of digital health systems requires investment in ongoing and meaningful consultation with communities and representative organisations.

The life and death of confidentiality: a historical analysis of the flows of patient information.

Health data can contain sensitive information. People who consult a doctor seek help on issues that matter to them: they typically expect some form of confidentiality. However, the notion and practices of confidentiality have changed dramatically over time. In this article, we trace the history of confidentiality in the Danish healthcare system, which has one of the world's most integrated patient information infrastructures. Building on an analysis of legal and political documents dating back to the late seventeenth century, we show that confidentiality originated as a social phenomenon that helped build trust in healthcare professionals and gradually developed into an idiom of citizens rights. Lately, confidentiality has given way to more technocratic forms of data protection. As the political, legal and technological reality, which the idea of confidentiality once referred to, has radically changed, we argue that confidentiality has become what Ulrik Beck has called a 'zombie category'-a notion that lives on even if its content has passed away. If confidentiality has become a zombie concept, we suggest it is time to discuss what may take its place so that patient interests are protected in the current political economy of health data.

Of Numbers and Moods: Screening for Mental Health Issues in a Rohingya Refugee Camp in Bangladesh.

Screening refugees for mental health issues, medical assistants use a digital tool that produces a numerical score but also, importantly, attunes to the moods of their clients and the atmospheres of their homes. In this article, we propose the concept of numeration-attunement as helpful for medical anthropology. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among medical assistants working in the Kutapalong refugee camp in Bangladesh, we explore their assessment of the mental health of the refugees: its numeration-attunement. To develop the notion of numeration-attunement, we draw on numeration research as well as phenomenology. Comprehending how medical assistants assess the mental health of refugees requires attention both to numeration and datafication by way of a screening tool as well as the revelatory character of attunement to moods.

Tecnologias de informação e de comunicação, políticas sociais e o trabalho de assistentes sociais / Information and communication technologies, social policies and the social workers' job

Resumo: A subsunção do trabalho ao capital tornou os trabalhadores autômatos às máquinas-ferramentas. Esse controle e a perda de autoatividade demandaram inovações que se expandiram à reprodução social. Este artigo examina o uso das tecnologias digitais no processo de dataficação das políticas sociais públicas a partir do trabalho profissional de assistentes sociais. O acesso e o trabalho no Benefício de Prestação Continuada estão desafiados com o uso da automação sem transparência no processo decisório.

Abstract: The subsumption of labor to capital turned workers into automatons to machine tools. This control and loss of self-activity demanded innovations that expanded to social reproduction. This article examines the use of digital technologies in the datafication process of public social policies through the social workers' professional work. Access and work on the "Benefício de Prestação Continuada" are challenged by the use of automation without transparency in the decision making process.

The Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart urbanism: platformization and its underlying processes, institutional dimensions, and disruptive impacts.

The emerging phenomenon of platformization has given rise to what has been termed "platform society," a digitally connected world where platforms have penetrated the heart of urban societies-transforming social practices, disrupting social interactions and market relations, and affecting democratic processes. One of the recent manifestations of platformization is the Metaverse, a global platform whose data infrastructures, governance models, and economic processes are predicted to penetrate different urban sectors and spheres of urban life. The Metaverse is an idea of a hypothetical set of "parallel virtual worlds" that incarnate ways of living in believably virtual cities as an alternative to future data-driven smart cities. However, this idea has already raised concerns over what constitutes the global architecture of computer mediation underlying the Metaverse with regard to different forms of social life as well as social order. This study analyzes the core emerging trends enabling and driving data-driven smart cities and uses the outcome to devise a novel framework for the digital and computing processes underlying the Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart cities. Further, it examines and discusses the risks and impacts of the Metaverse, paying particular attention to: platformization; the COVID-19 crisis and the ensuing non-spontaneous "normality" of social order; corporate-led technocratic governance; governmentality; privacy, security, and trust; and data governance. A thematic analysis approach is adopted to cope with the vast body of literature of various disciplinarities. The analysis identifies five digital and computing processes related to data-driven smart cities: digital instrumentation, digital hyper-connectivity, datafication, algorithmization, and platformization. The novelty of the framework derived based on thematic analysis lies in its essential processual digital and computing components and the way in which these are structured and integrated given their clear synergies as to enabling the functioning of the Metaverse towards potentially virtual cities. This study highlights how and why the identified digital and computing processes-as intricately interwoven with the entirety of urban ways of living-arouse contentions and controversies pertaining to society' public values. As such, it provides new insights into understanding the complex interplay between the Metaverse as a form of science and technology and the other dimensions of society. Accordingly, it contributes to the scholarly debates in the field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) by highlighting the societal and ethical implications of the platformization of urban societies through the Metaverse.

The Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart cities: the ethics of the hyper-connectivity, datafication, algorithmization, and platformization of urban society.

Recent advances in computing and immersive technologies have provided Meta (formerly Facebook) with the opportunity to leapfrog or expedite its way of thinking and devising a global computing platform called the "Metaverse". This hypothetical 3D network of virtual spaces is increasingly shaping alternatives to the imaginaries of data-driven smart cities, as it represents ways of living in virtually inhabitable cities. At the heart of the Metaverse is a computational understanding of human users' cognition, emotion, motivation, and behavior that reduces the experience of everyday life to logic and calculative rules and procedures. This implies that human users become more knowable and manageable and their behavior more predictable and controllable, thereby serving as passive data points feeding the AI and analytics system that they have no interchange with or influence on. This paper examines the forms, practices, and ethics of the Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart cities, paying particular attention to: privacy, surveillance capitalism, dataveillance, geosurveillance, human health and wellness, and collective and cognitive echo-chambers. Achieving this aim will provide the answer to the main research question driving this study: What ethical implications will the Metaverse have on the experience of everyday life in post-pandemic urban society? In terms of methodology, this paper deploys a thorough review of the current status of the Metaverse, urban informatics, urban science, and data-driven smart cities literature, as well as trends, research, and developments. We argue that the Metaverse will do more harm than good to human users due to the massive misuse of the hyper-connectivity, datafication, algorithmization, and platformization underlying the associated global architecture of computer mediation. It follows that the Metaverse needs to be re-cast in ways that re-orientate in how users are conceived; recognize their human characteristics; and take into account the moral values and principles designed to realize the benefits of socially disruptive technologies while mitigating their pernicious effects. This paper contributes to the academic debates in the emerging field of data-driven smart urbanism by highlighting the ethical implications posed by the Metaverse as speculative fiction that illustrates the concerns raised by the pervasive and massive use of advanced technologies in data-driven smart cities. In doing so, it seeks to aid policy-makers in better understanding the pitfalls of the Metaverse and their repercussions upon the wellbeing of human users and the core values of urban society. It also stimulates prospective research and further critical perspectives on this timely topic.

Trouble with autonomy in behavioral insurance.

In this article, we study how people define, negotiate, and perform autonomy in relation to digital technologies, specifically in connection with behavioral insurance policies that involve forms of data tracking and health services. The article builds on focus group discussions, which we treat as a dynamic site of ethico-political deliberation to test ideas, talk about boundaries of acceptable control, and envision future scenarios. The ethico-political deliberations assess the legitimacy and usability of new behavioral tools. Concern over the nature and limits of autonomy is activated when people discuss how wellbeing-related decisions are delegated to algorithmically controlled systems. We argue for appreciating autonomy as a relational and ambiguous notion that is sensed and enacted in collaborations with devices in the form of distributed autonomy. Moreover, as reflected by the experiences of the insured, "autonomy" cannot be analyzed solely in the form transmitted by the liberal tradition; that is, as a clear-cut entity that can simply be "had", "exerted", or "controlled". Consequently, research, ethical considerations, and governance initiatives should pay attention to how values are "done" in the affect-laden technologically mediated relations and practices.

Data justice and data solidarity.

Datafication shapes and gradually transforms societies. Given this impact, issues of justice around data-driven practices have received more and more attention in recent years as shown, for example, by various reports and guidelines on artificial intelligence and data ethics. In this article, we elaborate on and defend two claims. First, these discourses on justice tend to center primarily around conceptions of fairness. We argue that justice in connection with datafication relates to, but ultimately encompasses more than, solely fairness. Second, although it is an important project to clarify what justice in connection with datafication encompasses, we argue that attention toward attitudes and practices of data solidarity have so far been largely overlooked. They are, however, indispensable as a catalytic element to advance toward data justice in practice.