ABSTRACT
The 2013 Snowden revelations launched an ongoing series of surveillance controversies, implicating both governments and corporations in violations of privacy that involves basically anyone with an internet connection. While news about extensive post-9/11 data gathering and intelligence did not begin with Snowden, the NSA revelations pushed the debate to a dominant theme of global news and of moral and political outrage regarding fundamental shifts in data collection practices, infrastructures, and capacities. The more recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed that the company harvested the personal Facebook data of 87 million users in order to manipulate how they vote, represents another high point. It demonstrates how data collection and sorting practices have transformed election campaigns and other political communication strategies by using psychometric data to micro-target advertisements, amounting to covert and deceitful messaging, including misinformation. It also puts a spotlight on the increasing temptation for different kinds of actors to exploit people’s practical dependency on social media platforms and their lack of media savvy, suggesting among other things, massive efforts to dissuade people from voting (Howard & Bradshaw 2017). Five years after the initial Snowden revelations, it is obvious that major social institutions are increasingly driven by such datafication—turning aspects of our life into data for sale to the highest bidder—and that data are a central component of social power in the digital age.
