Outputs

Final conference

The final conference of the project “V-Data - The value of digital data: enhancing citizens’ awareness and voice about surveillance capitalism”, funded by Fondazione Cariplo, will take place 7-8 September 2023 at the University of Pavia (https://web-en.unipv.it/about-us/), Department of Political and Social Sciences, Italy. The event will comprise panel presentations and one keynote session hosting the internationally renowned scholar Stefania Milan (https://www.stefaniamilan.net/about-me/). A maximum of 25 papers will be selected for presentation. Preference will be given to speakers who plan to attend the conference in person, but a small number of remote presentations (no more than one per panel) may be included in the programme. The organising committee is exploring options to publish a special issue in a peer review journal associated with this call for contributions.

Call for contributions

DEADLINE EXTENDED: the deadline for sending your contributions has been extended until 12 May 2023! We invite researchers who are active in the field of surveillance capitalism, data justice, algorithmic studies, data ethics, Science and Technology Studies (STS), digital and computational methods, digital labour, media consumption and attitudes, critical consumer studies, platform studies (and many more) to submit proposals for paper presentations. Please submit an abstract (max. 300 words) to the event organisers by sending it via email to vdataresearch@gmail.com by 12 May 2023.

The conference theme is The value of digital data: advancing empirical research on surveillance capitalism. We encourage proposals from researchers with a variety of backgrounds, including academic research, activism, marketing research, journalists, and government social research. The following are examples of topics that are of particular interest:

• Public opinion and awareness about processes of data extraction, appropriation, and valorisation.
• Emic conceptions of data value: surveillance capitalism imaginaries across socio-economic groups, cultures, ethnicities, age cohorts, and geographies.
• Consumer practices of resistance, compliance and negotiation towards vocal assistants, targeted advertising, algorithmic systems of recommendation, AI devices (etc.).
• The nexus between Covid-19 pandemic and surveillance capitalism.
• Digital labour exploitation in surveillance capitalism (or surreptitious strategies of data appropriation).
• Working in the data factory (e.g., data cleaning, moderation, data entry, etc.).
• Innovative methods for studying surveillance capitalism.
• Digital and computational methods for studying surveillance capitalism (or how to surveille the surveillants).
• Survey methods for studying surveillance capitalism.
• Making surveillance capitalism visible through data visualisation (and other visual aids).
• Arts and surveillance capitalism imaginaries.
• Utopian and dystopian imaginaries of surveillance capitalism.
• Data activism and surveillance capitalism.
• Surveillance capitalism in the Global South.
• Big data and finance.
• Discrimination, inequalities and injustice related to processes of surveillance capitalism.
• How does the concept of data value change according to different stakeholders (consumers, marketers, brands, analysts, etc.) as well as market segments (e.g. automotive, food, fashion, etc.)?
• Big data consumer profiling and implication on identity and subjectivity.
• How digital affordances shape imaginaries of and practices related to surveillance capitalism.
• The platformization of consumer imagination and practices (or how platforms standardise consumer behaviours to make them more predictable and data-ready).
• Living with the hyper-nudging.

Conference venue

The conference will take place at the University of Pavia (https://web-en.unipv.it/about-us/), Department of Political and Social Sciences, Italy. Pavia is located 30 km south of Milan, to which is connected by trains every 30 minutes.

Important dates

Abstracts are due by 12 May 2023. These should include the author(s) name and position, a short title, and a clear indication of whether they plan to attend the conference in person or remotely. Acceptance notices will be given by 31 May 2023.

Fees and Accommodation

The event fee is 80 Euros. Fee includes: a) welcome package; b) daily lunches and coffee break; c) social dinner. The fee does not include accommodation. Anyway, for those interested the Department provides up to 15 single rooms at a convenient rate of euros 49 by the University dorms. Participants who are interested in staying at the University dorms must mention it in their submission. Priority in the allocation of rooms will be given to early-career scholars and according to submission date.

Organising committee

Alessandro Caliandro, Flavio Ceravolo, Guido Legnante, Samantha Conte, Antonella Orologiaio, Susanna Sassi (Università di Pavia), Emma Garavaglia (Politecnico di Milano), Alessandra Gaia (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca), Dario Pizzul (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore).

Conference programme

Thursday, September 7th

• 10:00 AM: Registration opens
• 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM: Welcome and openings
• 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM: Light Lunch

1:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Session 1 - Resistance & Countersurveillance (Aula B) - Chair: Veronica Moretti

• Lucio Pereira Mello: Battle for platform regulation in Brazil: mapping data as political strategy
• John Boy: Practical Rejections of Surveillance Capitalist Platforms and Their Directions
• Matteo Adamoli and Tiziana Piccioni: Practices of resistance in digital third spaces: critical aspects of the platformisation during the pandemic in high education
• Milana Pisarić: Digital Surveillance State vs. Digital Privacy Rights

Session 2 – Theory (Aula Grande) - Chair: Alessandro Caliandro

• Gianmarco Cristofari: A comparative historical account of value production inside digital platforms
• Adam Arvidsson: The Question of the Digital in the Anthropocene
• Dario Pizzul and Alessandro Caliandro: A systematic literature review of surveillance capitalism: towards an empirical research agenda
• Guido Anselmi: Yet another round of disruption: the imaginary of LLMs in social and legacy media

3:00 PM - 3:30 PM: Break

3:30 PM - 4:30 PM: Keynote Speech (Aula Grande) Stefania Milan (Professor of Critical Data Studies at the University of Amsterdam)

4:30 PM - 6:30 PM

Session 3 – Awareness (Aula B) - Chair: Marco Gui

• Martin Trans: Datafying groceries: consumers’ willingness to participate in loyalty programs
• Margherita Bordignon, Guido Legnante, Chiara Respi, Marco Gui and Dario Pizzul: The price is right: exploring the economic value of personal data among Italian citizens
• Riccardo Pronzato: The reproduction of hegemony in youth’s everyday platform engagements
• Chiara Respi, Marco Gui, Guido Legnante, Dario Pizzul, Tiziano Gerosa, Gaetano Scaduto and Miriam Serini: Privacy protection as an exception in the digital inequality framework (and why this is not good news)

Session 4 - Geographical contexts (Aula Grande) - Chair: Guido Legnante

• Salvatore Romano, Davide Beraldo and Ilir Rama: The Impact of TikTok Policies on Information Flows during Times of War: Evidence of ‘Splinternet’ and ‘Shadow-Promotion’ in Russia
• Susanna Sassi and Guido Legnante: How media and journalism represent surveillance capitalism in Italy
• Claudio Bellinzona: The future of smart cities in the context of surveillance capitalism. The case of Dubai
• Isabela Rosal Santos: The regulation of data brokers in Europe: solutions presented by the new regulations

7:30 PM: Social dinner “Horti” - Lungo Ticino Sforza, 46, 27100 Pavia

Friday, September 8th

9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Session 5 – Activism (Aula B) - Chair: Alessandro Caliandro

• Alice di Leva, Emma Garavaglia and Annavittoria Sarli: Social injustice in surveillance capitalism: reflections on the Italian context
• Annika Richterich: Who values Data Minimalism? On Solidarity in Feminist Data Activism
• Peter Mechant, Sander Van Damme, Marteen de Mildt, Steven Dewaele, and Laurens Vandercruysse: Personal Data Stores and data cooperatives: a two-pronged, sociotechnical approach for data activism
• Michele Veneziano: Monitoring public administrations to fight surveillance capitalism: Practices and imaginaries of an Italian tech watchdog

Session 6 – Algorithms (Aula Grande) - Chair: Dario Pizzul

• Massimo Airoldi and Tiziano Bonini: Capturing habitus: how algorithms extract value from platformized culture
• Natalia Stanusch: Memeing Algorithmic Imaginaries: How Users Fight against and Comply with Recommendation Algorithms Using Data
• Davide Beraldo, Massimo Airoldi, Sander van Haperen and Stefania Milan: Algorithms as Cultural Objects: mapping algorithmic imaginaries on Twitter
• Luca Giuffrè: Algorithm Literacy at School: teenagers reasoning of algorithm-mediated experiences

11:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Coffee break

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM

Session 7 – Work and cultural production (Aula B) - Chair: Natalia Stanusch

• Alessandro Gandini, Marianna d’Ovidio and Ilir Rama: Community, cultural production and the pandemic
• Josephine West: Sex, Power and Surveillance Capitalism in the Multi-Billion Dollar Camming Sector
• Emma Garavaglia, Annavittoria Sarli and Francesco Diodati: Carework platforms in Italy: a qualitative research

Session 8 - Family & parenting (Aula Grande) - Chair: Alessandro Caliandro

• Julie Dereymaeker, Tom De Leyn and Ralf De Wolf: Datafied families and parental surveillance by default? Exploring parental care and surveillance in the construction of smart home technology
• Ribak Rivka and Gal Shayovitz: Surveillance Capitalism In Embryo
• Mathias Klang: Parental Panopticons and Everyday Resistance: Domestic Surveillance and young adults

Da qui è possibile accedere a due interessanti documenti, pensati per docenti e studenti, utili per saperne di più sulle leggi italiane che tutelano privacy e reputazione online.

Privacy per educatori

Una risorsa per insegnanti ed educatori che vogliano saperne di più sulle basi giuridiche della gestione della privacy e dei dati online, così da supportare le più giovani e i più giovani nell’utilizzo degli strumenti digitali.

Privacy per studenti

Una risorsa che aiuta le più giovani e i più giovani a comprendere le fondamenta ed il funzionamento delle leggi che proteggono la nostra privacy e reputazione online.

Hereby a useful directory of Initiatives and Research Centres working on several issues and topics related to surveillance capitalism (such as dataveillance, data activism, data ethics, data privacy & transparency, platform surveillance, etc.)

Open the spreadsheet and contact us if you want to contribute to the list.

Hereby the slides that we presented at the 2022 Surveillance & Society Rotterdam Conference. Each set of slides is accompanied by the related abstract.

A systematic literature review of surveillance capitalism towards a research agenda

Although surveillance capitalism - as intended by Shoshana Zuboff - is an emerging topic, it already attracted the attention of many scholars from different fields within social sciences. Therefore, in this contribution we propose a systematic literature review of the topic of surveillance capitalism. Specifically, we developed a systematic literature review on a pool of 161 academic articles automatically extracted (through a Python script) from ad hoc scientific sources (e.g., Scopus), which we processed with computational techniques of text analysis (e.g., co-word analysis, topic modelling, TF-IDF). Also, a close reading of a sample of 30 articles was conducted. Results show that the topic of surveillance capitalism is composed by six main sub-topics: marketing & social control, big data & datafication, platforms & platformization, data privacy & protection, culture of surveillance, AI. We argue that all these key sub-topics need to be addressed attentively (or at least taken into consideration) when dealing with academic research and/or writing on surveillance capitalism, also paying attention on how each dimension inform and co-construct each other.

Mapping the culture of surveillance capitalism on Twitter

Although surveillance capitalism is already well-established in advanced economies, we can argue that the current Covid-19 emergence has probably accelerate the diffusion of surveillance capitalism logics and infrastructures (e.g., platformization of higher education). Despite the pervasiveness and currency of this phenomenon, we still know very little about how the general public perceives and frames it. In particular, there is a shortage of empirical research on citizens’ opinions towards surveillance capitalism as well as their level of awareness about the processes of data exploitation and value extraction carried out by corporate platforms on the very data users produce through their everyday digital practices. To address this research gap, we developed an exploration (based on digital methods) on dataset of 302k Italian tweets (collected by following ad hoc keywords, such as ‘surveillance + Facebook’, ‘surveillance + iPhone’, etc). We analyzed this dataset combining computational and qualitative techniques – network analysis, topic modelling, ethnographic content analysis. Our preliminary results show that, on a general level, Twitter users seem unable to distinguish between processes of surveillance upon citizens and consumers (which they consider basically the same thing). Anyhow, on a micro level, specific communities of users tend to develop different narratives on surveillance capitalism, imagining different ‘models’ of it (such as, dystopian surveillance, benevolent surveillance, conspiracy surveillance, entertainment surveillance).

Algorithmic countersurveillance Immuni on Reddit

This research proposes a reflection on the implications of dataveillance (based on algorithms) and practices of countersurveillance in the healthcare field. Countersurveillance is the practice of making surveillance activities of institutions difficult or implementing technologies to evade surveillance altogether. Countersurveillance achieves its goal by subverting various components of the surveillance process and it has many applications. It can be used to protect privacy, civil liberties, and against abuses of surveillance. Additionally, it may be employed to push surveillance systems beyond their breaking point and in doing so it identifies potential vulnerabilities and points of error. Many countersurveillance techniques use human methods rather than electronic; these activities might include ‘evasion’ (e.g., avoiding risky locations, being discreet or using code words), ‘being situation-aware’; ‘hiding in secure locations’; and ‘concealing one’s identity’. Through this proposal we want to explore resistance practices and imaginaries applied to algorithmic surveillance in the health domain. Specifically, we explore the debate on the Immuni App on Reddit.