Rethinking Privacy: A Feminist Approach to Privacy Rights after Snowden

A research article by Lindsay Weinberg. Abstract:

"Tim Cook’s message to Apple customers, regarding Apple’s refusal to
provide the FBI with a backdoor to the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone,
typifies the corporate appropriation of privacy rights discourse. In
light of this appropriation, I propose a reconsideration of the
sovereign subject presupposed by privacy rights discourse through a
comparative approach to the US and EU’s treatments of privacy rights. I
then apply feminist theories of the non-sovereign subject, which
challenge liberal democratic discourse’s construction of the subject by
emphasising social interdependence. I argue that critical scholars of
surveillance and the digital economy need to address the fact that the
digital economy is predicated on the subject’s non-sovereignty, where
individuals can be fragmented and combined into the mass collection of
data. I conclude with a discussion of how the non-sovereignty of the
subject under commercial surveillance could also provide the grounds for
the socialized redistribution of big data profits."