Did you give permission? Datafication in the mobile ecosystem

ABSTRACT

Our article presents a finely granulated perspective on the technical objects of datafication. We contend that such cross-disciplinary focus provides a more rigorous material grounding for a critical analysis of the socio-cultural and political economic effects of mobile actors expanding and extending personal data economies. We propose a two-part hypothesis. First, that the mobile is enabling a more mature phase of datafication. Second, that this phase is best understood by examining the relationality between mobile permissions and embedded, third party services known as SDKs (software development kits). Our innovative method seeks to cultivate greater technical fluency for humanities and social science researchers and to offer non-experts greater agency over the myriad ways in which datafication increasingly subsumes our everyday lives. We proceed by (i) a review of existing technical and social scientific literatures; (ii) introducing the platform and resources we created, which holds the permissions and SDKs of over 7000 applications; and (iii) presenting preliminary findings from workshops held at 2019 OrgCon Digital Rights conference with Berlin based non-profit organisation, Tactical Tech. We conclude with a call for a microscopic perspective on the technical objects that comprise application infrastructures. We contend that only a more grounded understanding of their generative capacities can improve our understanding how datafication is extended in platforms like Google and Facebook via the app services they provide and thus instantiating themselves across this ecosystem.

KEYWORDS:

• Datafication
• apps
• mobile
• methods
• platforms
• critical data literacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Manifest Destiny can be accessed here: https://manifestdestiny.reveb.la/-- To clarify, we use this term to echo nineteenth-century American geopolitical doctrine which assumed an inexorable continental expansion and subsumption of Canada and Mexico. This did not happen. We wished to echo this insofar as data manifests have significantly expanded to enable greater data capture. Yet we mean it to also echo the failure of the doctrine, and that there is no ‘destiny’ that our lives must be circumscribed by (primarily commercial) data capture. In short, by making accessible the technical objects of manifest data, we hope to increase agency as opposed to surrendering to destiny.

2 See also Blanke and Pybus (2020).

3 For anyone not familiar with this term, you can think of an APK as the code and assets that make up any given Android application.

4 We have worked within the Android environment given that is much more open than iOS, which has been designed as a closed ecosystem. Based on interviews, we have learned that while Android and Apple are different the backend of how apps work are comparable.

5 Credit to Héloïse Eloi-Hammer for creating this infographic.

6 See here for a full list: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/permissions/overview

7 All permissions are capitalised to remain consistent with their Android format: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.permission.html

8 Privacy by Design was initially a systems approach developed by Cavoukian (2009) and has subsequently been adopted by the GDPR legislation to ensure that privacy is always taken into account throughout the whole engineering process. We argue that privacy should be engineered more transparently to render permissions more accountable within this legal framework.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the AHRC [grant number AH/R008477/1].

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Pybus

Dr Jennifer Pybus is a Canada Research Chair in Data, Democracy and AI at York University with a growing international reputation around processes of datafication, privacy and data literacy. Her research investigates those critical points of tension that lie at the intersection of digital culture, AI and algorithmic processes, and emerging infrastructures that are set up to capture and action personal data. Part of this work focuses on the political economy of social media platforms, display ad economies, and the mobile ecosystem.

M. Coté

Mark Coté is a leading researcher in critical digital methods focusing on the social, cultural, and political economic dimensions of big data, algorithms and machine learning. He is a Senior Lecturer in Data Culture and Society in the Digital Humanities department of King's College London. He has been funded by the AHRC, EPSRC and H2020, primarily in cross-disciplinary projects on a European scale, primarily with computer scientists, data scientists and app developers.