Paper long abstract:

This paper will examine the fraught processes entailed in researching the everyday connections between individuals' experiences of information exchange, and the vast data storehouses of states and global capital, across online and offline boundaries. The paper will particularly consider the various impediments to such research, including those challenges posed by proscribed interactions, systems of ownership and control, and regulatory regimes. The paper touches on the multiple and overlapping relations of power throughout these connections, as well as the positioning of the data subject in such relations. The paper concludes with some reflections on the questions that remain for surveillance studies scholars over whether any evidentiary basis for an understanding of the relationship between a data subject and a 'data double' will ever be possible.