Trading Social Visibility for Economic Amenability: Data-based Value Translation on a “Health and Fitness Platform”

Abstract

Research on privacy practices in digital environments has oftentimes discovered a paradoxical relationship between users’ discursive appraisal of privacy and their actual practices: the “privacy paradox.” The emergence of this paradox prompts us to conduct ethnography of a health and fitness platform in order to flesh out the structural mechanisms generating this paradox. We provide an ethnographic analysis of surveillance capitalism in action that relates front-end practices empirically to the data economy’s back-end operations to show how this material-semiotic setup elicits users’ desire to become self-determined subjects in a way that makes them amenable as objects of behavioral engineering. We combine different ethnographic methods and materials (situational mapping: network overview; discourse analysis: interpellations; autoethnography: practices; technical app analysis: data flow; business model canvas: revenue information) to specify how different types of values are produced and translated on the investigated platform. The latter offers users the values of self-mastery and social visibility. However, the data generated in this process serve to translate these values into the value of economic amenability and thereupon ultimately into economic profit. What gets lost in translation, though, is the front-end promise of self-mastery. It is these structural mechanisms that generate the privacy paradox in the first place.