The Economy of Social Data: Exploring Research Ethics as Device

Abstract

The following article argues that research ethics and data regulatory frameworks can be understood as devices that articulate a particular kind of social data economy. Following Waldby and Mitchell's (2006) work on biological material economies it explores how social research ethics and data regulatory frameworks in the United Kingdom, organized around the notions of informed consent and anonymization, have favoured a model in which privacy is disentangled from the human agency to which it makes reference in order to be converted and objectified as data. Informed consent and anonymization are hence here analysed as devices which enable the circulation, exchange and valuation of data, or in other words, as devices which enable the conversion of privacy into property. In particular, the paper argues that informed consent enacts a legitimate transaction between data subject and data controller and can be therefore understood as a surrogate property contract. On the other hand, anonymization, which works by suppressing the author function, renders singular data units commensurable and aggregatable in the form of databases, a procedure which supports the emergence of a specific set of property rights. Finally, the conclusion critically addresses the work of ethics as a device as new datascapes organized by the principle of traceability produce ‘the human’ as disaggregated and distributed.