SSLIS seminar | Data is a hyperobject - implications for consent — Jesse Dinneen & Vitus Thomas

Data is a hyperobject - implications for consent — Jesse Dinneen & Vitus Thomas

The everyday collection of personal data, especially in digital domains like the Web, is commonly justified by the claim that it is done with the data subject's informed consent. Numerous past works have raised doubts that individuals are, in practice, sufficiently informed to give such consent, for example because they do not or cannot read or understand the terms they nominally agree to. Here we offer a new reason to doubt such consent is even possible in principle: data, we argue, constitute a hyperobject, which has metaphysical and epistemological attributes that preclude informed consent and has implications for legal frameworks of consent such as in the GDPR.

Jesse Dinneen is senior lecturer at SSLIS: https://www.hb.se/en/research/research-portal/researchers/jesse-dinneen/

Vitus Thomas is a student of philosophy at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he has worked as a Research Assistant at the Information Science chair. He works on philosophy of information, epistemology, and continental philosophy, with an emphasis on psychological and ethical implications. He is a former international scholar at University of California, Berkeley.

Zoom: https://hb-se.zoom.us/j/66891319632
Language: English
Chair: TBA

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