Problems in protections for working data subjects: the social relations of data production

Abstract

‘Problems in protections for working data subjects: the social relations of data production’ argues that existing AI and data and privacy regulation do not sufficiently provide protections from harm in the context of data extraction and mining. This is because the approaches taken are individualist in relational positioning and do not take into account differences across data subject types. The argument updates legal philosophical arguments rooted in propertarian and identitarian assumptions for how data harms can be prevented, arguing that what is needed is a discussion of the social relations of data production and the portrayal of a constellation of power relations rather than identifying a data subject as suspended in midair.