Paper short abstract:

Health data are collected and made "useful" in medical marketing. I explore how data brokers make assets out of health data. These assets are unleashed by marketers and become "data phantoms" that haunt patients, primarily through personalized health marketing.

Paper long abstract:

My paper focuses on how data phantoms haunt health information networks in the United States. Such information is often assumed to be "private data," as it is produced by patients under legislative privacy protection, but these data, in fact, undergo innovations and are packaged into data assets to be sold to data brokers, like IMS Health Inc. and Experian plc. I discuss how innovation transforms health information from "dead" matter into "lively" data, and in the process gives birth to both data commodities and data ownership claims made by third parties.

The bio-data asset is imbued with a "phantom-like objectivity" that takes on a power and agency of its own (Marx 1976, Vol. 1:128). The social conditions of capitalist medicine and the "Big Data" industries help to construct the data asset. In fact, a market logic suffuses the anonymization, repackaging, and abstraction of health data (Rajan 2006, 42). This is the value of the data asset and through this transmutation, the data goes on to live a life of its own in the databases of clinics, pharmaceutical companies, health informatics analysts, data brokers, credit card companies, and many other unconnected companies that directly profit from the buying and selling of private health data.

Throughout the paper I consider how these interventions raise questions about what is considered public and private information, who may lay claim to data ownership and why, and how those tensions are exploited by US capitalist medicine and the healthcare industries, especially those companies working in digital health.