We’ve generally come to accept that our devices are listening to our conversations, our personal data is being tracked and sold, and that law enforcement tracks and stores images of our own faces. But is there anything to be done about our dwindling digital privacy? While there is a growing community of people committed to protecting our privacy online, a new lab at Princeton University pays particular attention to the challenges and threats that Black and other marginalized people face under our digital surveillance state.

Kenia Hale, a predoctoral fellow, and Payton Croskey, a rising senior, are members of Princeton’s Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, where they research ways people of color can resist this surge of digital surveillance. The lab, created and led by sociologist Ruha Benjamin, “brings together students, educators, activists and artists to develop a critical and creative approach to data conception, production and circulation,” and aims to “rethink and retool the relationship between stories and statistics, power and technology, justice and data.”

Hale and Croskey led a project this spring called “Liberatory Technology and Digital Marronage.” Their team researched various technologies that reject and subvert the growing prevalence of digital surveillance, as well as technologies creating refuges from mainstream digital society. They compiled their findings into a zine and online repository, and are developing an app, Our Space, built off of their work.

Boston Review Black Voices in the Public Sphere Fellow Nate File spoke with Hale and Croskey about their research, the possibilities of technologies that respond to the needs of marginalized people, and the red flag of any digital technology claiming to be neutral.

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continua qui: https://bostonreview.net/articles/how-a-new-generation-is-combatting-digital-surveillance/