A Feminist Critique to Digital and AI Consent

This talk presents a feminist critique to digital and AI consent and argues that the current system is flawed. The online surveillance adtech industry that funds the web had to use a mechanism that commodifies people, rendering their behaviors into data – products that can be sold and traded for the highest bidder. In this way, digital consent serves as an authorizing and legalizing instrument to the business model of spying, selling and trading people in the online ecosystem. This then helps to fuel the AI industry that uses these data as training data for the generation of text, image and video. Using four key feminist approaches – process, embodiment, network and context – this talk argues that digital consent is a mechanism that transfers responsibility to people and enables exploitative-extractivist markets to exist. Consequently, the broader educational effects of digital consent produces people as products with narrow agency and understanding.

Bio

Dr Elinor Carmi is a Senior Lecturer in Data Justice and Social Justice at the Sociology & Criminology Department at City University, London, UK. Dr Carmi is a digital rights advocate, feminist, researcher and journalist who has been working, writing and teaching on data politics, data literacies, feminist approaches to media and data, data justice and internet governance. Currently Dr Carmi works on the Nuffield Foundation project “Developing a Minimum Digital Living Standard”. Dr Carmi’s work contributes to emerging debates in academia, policy, health organisations and digital activism. She was a Parliamentary Academic Fellowship working with the UK’s Digital, Culture, Media & Sport Committee, as well as gave evidence on Digital Literacy for the House of Lords Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies. In 2020, Dr Carmi was invited by the World Health Organization (WHO) as an expert on data literacy and disinformation to the first scientific discussion on infodemiology.

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