Searching for a Room of One's Own in Cyberspace : Datafication and the Global Feminisation of Privacy

Since its conceptualisation, the construction of privacy has been deeply gendered, as women and gender and sexual minorities are often at the receiving end of forms of privacy that are subordinating, rather than equalising. In this essay, I argue that, as a result of pervasive datafication, we are now witnessing a generalisation of such problematic interpretations of privacy, to include and affect everybody. Although datafication is fundamentally reconfiguring our bodies and our lives, a comprehensive rethink of what it means to substantially protect privacy in this context remains lacking. As a consequence, the watered-down, inferior version of privacy that women and sexual and gender minorities historically have been faced with is now extended to all: we are effectively witnessing a global feminisation of privacy.This essay first examines in what ways dominant understandings of privacy have been gendered and how such gendering has been reflected in Indian jurisprudence in particular, through a fundamental curtailment of the decisional autonomy of women and gender and sexual minorities and of their ability to engage in self-determination. It then argues that, in the age of datafication, this predicament now presents itself to all of us, as a result of three trends in particular: the specific ways in which consent and anonymity are mobilised by surveillance capitalism (and government) as key tools to drive the datafication of our lives; the resulting reconfiguration of the public and the private; and the portrayal and treatment of data as by default disembodied and deterritorialised. It is these three trends that lie at the heart of the global feminisation of privacy