Essay by Sun-ha Hong: “In 2014, a Canadian firm made history. Calgary-based McLeod Law brought the first known case in which Fitbit data would be used to support a legal claim. The device’s loyalty was clear: the young woman’s personal injury claim would be supported by her own Fitbit data, which would help prove that her activity levels had dipped post-injury. Yet the case had opened up a wider horizon for data use, both for and against the owners of such devices. Leading artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Kate Crawford noted at the time that the machines we use for “self-tracking” may be opening up a “new age of quantified self incrimination.”
Subsequent cases have demonstrated some of those possibilities. In 2015, a Connecticut man reported that his wife had been murdered by a masked intruder. Based partly on the victim’s Fitbit data, and other devices such as the family house alarm, detectives charged the man — not a masked intruder — with the crime. “In 2016, a Pennsylvania woman claimed she was sexually assaulted, but police argued that the woman’s own Fitbit data suggested otherwise, and charged her with false reporting.” In the courts and elsewhere, data initially gathered for self-tracking is increasingly being used to contradict or overrule the self — despite academic research and even a class action lawsuit alleging high rates of error in Fitbit data.
The data always travels, creating new possibilities for judging and predicting human lives. We might call it control creep: data-driven technologies tend to be pitched for a particular context and purpose, but quickly expand into new forms of control. Although we often think about data use in terms of trade-offs or bargains, such frameworks can be deeply misleading. What does it mean to “trade” personal data for the convenience of, say, an Amazon Echo, when the other side of that trade is constantly arranging new ways to sell and use that data in ways we cannot anticipate? As technology scholars Jake Goldenfein, Ben Green and Salomé Viljoen argue, the familiar trade-off of “privacy vs. X” rarely results in full respect for both values but instead tends to normalize a further stripping of privacy….(More)”.