BBC Radio 4 Feature
My evasion work was featured on BBC Radio 4's Digital Human in the episode "OVERTURN". What happens when the data you freely gave away in exchange for convenient services is bought and sold, and re-interpreted under new rules?
For millions of women in the United States facing the reality of a post-Roe-v-Wade America, their innocent period trackers, search histories, and smartwatches formed a web ready to give them away to the authorities in the case of an unexpected or unviable pregnancy. I discussed my pregnancy experiment, best practices for reproductive privacy, and the limitations that face so many people who try to evade detection as I did.
Alongside my colleague Gina Neff at Cambridge, two journalists at Gizmodo, and a woman who confronted the problems of period tracking, we discuss the issues with data brokerage, repurposing, and the unexpected twists when the underlying legal landscape suddenly places you and your data at risk.
The truth is, there has always been a problem with data reinterpretation. Philosopher Helen Nissenbaum at Cornell long ago named this problem "Contextual Integrity": data means one thing in one context, but something very different in another. Usually we think of contextual integrity as a problem when data migrates from one service or company to another. But we readily forget that regime changes might easily bring a re-contextualization too.