Towards 'data justice': Bridging anti-surveillance and social justice activism.

The Snowden leaks, first published in June 2013, provided unprecedented insights into the operations of state-corporate surveillance, highlighting the extent to which everyday communication is integrated into forms of control that rely on the “datafication” of social life. Whilst such data-driven forms of governance have significant implications for citizenship and society, resistance to data-driven surveillance in the wake of the Snowden leaks predominantly centred on techno-legal responses relating to the development and use of encryption and policy advocacy around privacy and data protection. Based on in-depth interviews with a range of social justice activists we highlight the limitations of such framings of data politics. Introducing the notion of “data justice”, we therefore go on to make the case that resistance to datafication needs to be (re)conceptualized on terms that can engage with data politics in relation to broader social justice agendas. Such an approach is needed, we suggest, in light of the central role of data-driven processes in contemporary capitalism.