Emerging local data futures

I'm back! A revival of Civic Source and recent developments in thinking around data rights, anti-surveillance, and collective practice.

Hello to everyone who’s still here! Welcome back! Thanks for being here!

You might remember that in 2021, I wrote a series of articles based on my own research and conversations with people in government and civic tech about the unseen ways that data and technology systems shape our neighborhoods and communities. 

Bringing light to what data and technology have to do with our everyday lived realities — our sidewalks, our parks, our libraries, our friends, our jobs — was my way of trying to bring organizers, advocates, or any people who fight for the well-being of those around them into the conversation around data and technology governance. 

Since writing the newsletter, lots of things have changed! The world has changed. What I know and feel about the world has changed. I’ve deepened my roots in Houston and grown in care for the people here in ways I didn’t know were possible (special thanks to my H-town readers, love you big).

I’ve also questioned myself a lot. Why am I so compelled by the ways that data can help us translate experiences and information, data movements, data flows? Why should we care that companies use extractive platforms to shape culture and society?

I hope to get into those questions through this newsletter but one thing is for sure: There is no longer any escape from the influence of tech platforms on our bodies, hearts, and minds. Tech companies that unilaterally govern these platforms do so in order to make it easier to extract everything that they need to build their future. 

They manufacture our consent for exploitation both of workers and of natural resources like conflict metals/minerals while designing and selling us more products, advancing rampant consumerism, and not to mention plotting the obsolescence of swaths of the workforce. 

Our data, and by extension our bodies, are the source of tech companies’ power to enact these harms. 

It’s more urgent than ever that together we develop an awareness and ability to act in response to tech companies shaping the future. That involves educating ourselves about how control over access to our personal and community data could help undermine their power and prevent further exploitation. 

{Personal data = Any information that relates to an identifiable individual. Different pieces of information, which collected together can lead to the identification of a particular person, also constitute personal data.} From the European Commission. 

{Community data = A new definition I’m proposing to capture data that pertains to neighborhood assets, infrastructure, behavioral patterns, movements, natural resources, lands, or places under the collective stewardship of a community.}

In order to build collective power to resist data extraction by systems of power of all kinds, communities can self-organize in similar ways to other political terrains to build political leverage. Just like labor unions can help people bargain for better working conditions, and just like land trusts can help neighborhood residents regain control over community land, neighborhood data boards or similar cooperative structures could represent a new form of collective bargaining for data at the local level. 

Community data is already a resource that is being collected, shared, analyzed, and stewarded by dozens of community organizations in every neighborhood. But without language or understanding of data rights, these organizations, which often already have strong ties and dialogue with local community members, might miss the opportunity to leverage control over data as an asset in relations with elite research institutions, local governments, or private companies that don’t act toward the community’s best interests. 

In 2022, I wrote a blog post and subsequent report for the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy about why local governments need to understand tools like data cooperatives as tools to fight tech companies’ extraction of public data for profit. During my research fellowship, I spoke with various state and local government workers and technology entrepreneurs to better understand what’s already being done to advance data cooperatives and other power-building frameworks to fight back against data extraction in communities. 

What I’ve learned, in addition to what I’ve written about in my research, is that without public demand for data rights, governments have few incentives to solve the problem themselves. 

Similarly, tech entrepreneurs won’t save us. Many data cooperative engineers I heard from were white men interested in decentralized governance for deeply esoteric or even personal financial reasons, working in isolated communities of practice with limited engagement even in academia, let alone in real world organizing settings.

We have to solve the problem of control over access to data in community. 

I’ve come to believe that public demand for data rights will be impossible to cultivate from any positionality other than one of solidarity and true participation in communities where data rights are being abused. 

For example, research conducted by Adrienne Williams at the Distributed AI Research Institute shows that companies like Amazon can use surveillance to enable wage theft of delivery workers; Delivery workers who in general are increasingly surveilled across companies by employers and even by doorbell cameras, many of which connected directly to police surveillance systems through backdoor agreements until Amazon updated its policies last January.  

But data rights are also abused in more commonplace and socially reproducible ways. Take this as an example: 

Many communities that were severely affected by COVID-19 may have received multiple requests to participate in surveys and studies estimating after-effects. But research has found that in the wake of disasters or crises, “Being overburdened with too many research requests and failing to see any subsequent changes following participation may cause individuals to experience research fatigue.” 

In other words, community members who are surveyed year after year about their lack of access to housing, food, transit, education, or other life-sustaining resources may continue to see the lack of access and become disillusioned with participating, i.e. refuse to share their data. This is a well-documented phenomenon with regards to Census nonresponse rates.

While most governments respond to this issue by trying to motivate higher response through more persistent surveying, it does beg the question: If the same questions are asked on a survey year after year and no change happens, why should community members fill out the survey again? 

Why should people continue to give up their personal information to governments that don’t listen and can't mobilize information into systemic change?

Or more aptly, can we choose who we trust with our personal information before being compelled to fill out forms and give our data to institutions?

Would building the muscle to refuse data collection help us begin to build leverage against the more overtly harmful companies and institutions that exist to abuse or punish low income people and people of color? 

Our right to control access to our data goes beyond clicking No on Terms and Conditions for apps or websites. We have to examine how our data is collected across areas of our life. 

We can stop cycles of harm not only by regulating tech companies’ third party data sales or creating consent or opt out mandates, we can also teach people to cut off this extraction at the source. After all, governments and especially law enforcement benefit from mass tech surveillance.

We may choose not to consent to being identified. We may choose not to consent to the exploitation of our data. 

Over the next few months, I will be writing on whatever schedule I can manage to provide updates about my explorations into local data rights education.

I’d like to explore what data rights means to people who aren’t “plugged in” to the latest tech industry news or developments in emerging technology.

And I’d like to start developing tools and resources for people who are organizing around anti-surveillance or data rights in their own communities to have more inclusive, accessible, and empowering conversations with people who are handling personal or community data on the ground. 

Thanks so much for reading this far. Just a few more words of closing…

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This is exciting new ground for me and I look forward to diving deeper into what this work means in a groundswell moment where new ways of being feel closer on the horizon. I hope it feels that way for you too! 

Given that these are uncertain times with few ways or places for us to connect around these issues, I would sincerely invite anyone who feels moved by this work to write me directly or keep in touch at hello@katyaabaz.com. 

I am very proud to share that this research and action in community is being funded by the Voqal Fellowship, which has connected me to truly powerful guides in the practices of shaping and reshaping the world. I thank them all for their support!