Deep Dark Data: How Information Became Personal - Hardcover

by Alison Cool (Author)

Why does the problem of data privacy remain so intractable? Deep Dark Data explores how this contemporary problem begins with the ways we define and use personal data. Instead of debating how best to protect personal data, Alison Cool argues that we would be better off asking how data became personal in the first place. Drawing on years of ethnographic research in Sweden, the most datafied country in the world, Cool reveals that what we call personal data encapsulates a number of very different relations between data and persons, none of which are inherent in the data itself. This surprising and highly original book untangles these relations and traces their troubled histories, ultimately inviting us to understand privacy as a gendered and racialized politics of moral exclusion.

Back Jacket

"Wide-ranging, deeply researched, and propulsively written, Deep Dark Data offers a timely and truly original investigation into the nature of 'personal' data and privacy."--Alix Johnson, author of Where Cloud Is Ground: Placing Data and Making Place in Iceland

"Deep Dark Data is a fascinating journey into the origins of personal data. Alison Cool expertly combines a historical perspective on informational privacy with an ethnography of Swedish data management."--Baki Cakici, Associate Professor, Technologies in Practice, IT University of Copenhagen

Author Biography

Alison Cool is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder.