Short abstract:

The operative liberal concept of privacy is closely related to property; default frames for privacy protection feature "owning" one's data. Yet efforts towards a just digital future require re-thinking privacy via feminist scholarship on self-ownership, responsibility, and care relations.

Long abstract:

Protecting privacy is key to digital technology development. It is particularly salient for the FemTech industry given the ongoing criminalization and surveillance of (women's) reproductive capacities; the 2022 US Dobbs decision to revoke abortion rights unleashed a flood of concern about period tracking apps, for example. Drawing from this empirical context, this paper offers a conceptual exploration of privacy. The operative liberal concept of "privacy" is closely related to property, and consequently the default frames for privacy protection feature "owning" one's data and making decisions about it. Yet the new political-economic regime Zuboff has called "surveillance capitalism" centers precisely on digital data being owned by tech companies providing now-essential services. Efforts to protect privacy often operationalize a sort of salvage work, wrestling data ownership back into consumers/citizens’ hands. Yet this is almost inconceivable with respect to the monopoly power of big American tech companies, while citizens report resignation to a “no-exit situation” and that sharing one’s data is an acceptable tradeoff for convenience, efficiency, and participation in the latest digital frontiers. The “right to be forgotten,” a key principle in the EU’s GDPR program, is hard to imagine given the current opacity of digital tracking practices. This paper asks whether efforts towards a just digital future require re-thinking privacy otherwise than ownership. Taking inspiration from Petchesky's 1995 "The Body as Property: A Feminist Re-Vision,” I consider privacy via responsibilities and care relations. What would need to change to make such a transformation and its concomitant relations of trust possible?