Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology ... - The ICHRP

peoples of most countries, enormous volumes of personal information, a new and
valuable commodity, are largely held abroad. They are subject to extraterritorial laws,
feed extraterritorial markets, and are processed according to extraterritorial priorities.
This is so regardless of whether the privacy concerns in question have to do with market
or security surveillance. At some structural level, much private information is extracted
from the world’s poorer countries and processed in the richer ones.
For the peoples of most countries, enormous volumes of personal information
are largely held abroad. They are subject to extraterritorial laws, feed
extraterritorial markets, and are processed according to extraterritorial priorities.
Economy
As suggested throughout this Discussion Paper, the anxiety that the dataverse generates
is intimately associated with other interrelated developments occurring in parallel. Chief
among these are:
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The essential contribution of information technologies to economic growth, which
has tended in turn to fuel expansion of digital capacity and innovation;
The “return to privacy” in the social and economic policies of many Western states,
and in the development policies applied in non-Western states since the early and
especially late 1980s;
The “globalisation” of commerce, trade, and communications.
Countries of the “global South” are enmeshed in this global commercial and
informational web, but they generally (though not always) remain takers rather than
shapers of international norms and economic policies. In consequence, initiatives to
protect privacy often attend to the interests of private firms and international investors
before those of locals. Where this occurs, it is not merely a case of “democratic deficit”
or power asymmetry. Increasing private protection for foreign actors tends to render
them immune from local public oversight; indeed, that is partly the point. Local private
persons may lose entitlements or agency at a range of levels as a result.
Where foreign companies hold the personal data of locals, for example, or local
employees are subject to workplace monitoring by foreign employers, local law may
not provide local employees with adequate protection with regard to their employers.
As Mark Andrejevic writes in a different context: “The unexamined assertion of privacy
rights can have the perhaps unanticipated effect of protecting the commercial sector’s
privatization of personal information.” 120 They are even more evidently exposed to risk
when their personal data is held on servers located abroad.
not to allow ministry officials to use Blackberries in 2007. See, for example, Jenny Wortham, “BlackBerry
Maker Resists Governments Pressure”, The New York Times, August 3, 2010; “Blackberry ban for French
elite”, BBC news, June 20, 2007 (At: news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6221146.stm).
120 Mark Andrejevic, “Control Over Personal Information in the Database Era” 6 Surveillance & Society 322
(2009).
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