Hacking the social life of Big Data

TLDR

The paper builds on the Our Data Ourselves project, which studied how young people can understand and reclaim data they generate on smartphones. It investigates how mobile usage central to young people’s lives can be leveraged to uncover and capture data that platforms like Facebook monetize, aiming to restore agency through tools such as MobileMiner. The authors created the MobileMiner app and organized a hackathon to enable users to access and manipulate their own data. The preliminary intervention demonstrates that giving young people back access to their data opens new possibilities for data‑making and agency.

Abstract

This paper builds off the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understanding and reclaiming the data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. We outline the MobileMiner, an app we created to consider how gaining access to one’s own data not only augments the agency of the individual but of the collective user. Finally, we discuss the data making that transpired during our hackathon. Such interventions in the enclosed processes of datafication are meant as a preliminary investigation into the possibilities that arise when young people are given back the data which they are normally structurally precluded from accessing.