Data Exploits: Uncovering Pathways to Digital Autonomy for Science and Society

While promising solutions to key global challenges such as climate change, digital technologies can also intensify existing systems of exploitation. By enabling the collection, analysis and redistribution of exceptionally vast quantities of data about individuals and their lived environments, digital technologies often extract and manage data through top-down processes. Thus, even the most well-intentioned initiatives may be used for surveillance and control, for example, when tracking location data of indigenous peoples participating in digital wild life monitoring.

This NWO-Veni project offers novel perspectives on how and to what extent individuals and communities may be able to creatively adapt digital technologies to serve their own, autonomous interest, needs and values; and, thus, on how and to what extent it may possible to mitigate the potentials for exploitation that digital technologies create.

In addition, this project generates recommendations for more inclusive data management. It develops new tools for data management that will (1) explicitly acknowledge the long history of global exploitation; and subsequently, (2) prioritize a global plurality of needs, interests and values while (3) shifting core decision-making on both short- and long-term data management towards research participants and their communities.