Identosphere 172: Bodies, Data & Digital Embodiment
Kaliya "Identity Woman" Young's newsletter about all things digital identity, self-sovereign identity and the emerging developments in the field.
This collection is a bit different then what we usually cover related to Decentralized Identity and Self-Sovereign Identity Technologies.
Today we are sharing a series of articles, research and art at the intersection of physical bodies and datafication — how identity systems encode, extract from, and govern human bodies as data, and the intellectual traditions informing how we think about it.
[Report] From Skin to Screen:. .Bodily Integrity in the. .Digital Age (Mozilla)
This research paper examines the evolution of structured data collection related to the human body and mind, examining industry trends, promised benefits, associated harms, existing legal protections, and public attitudes toward body-focused data practices.
Academic Foundations
[Research] Towards Infomatic Personhood: understnading contemporary subjects in a data-driven society (Ashlin Lee)
This framework has two parts. The first – The Informatic Context – explores salient structural developments around data and conceptualises this as being defined by the presence of ‘data interfaces’ (that connect individuals to digital contexts), ‘data circulation’ (trends in the movement and storage of data), and ‘data abstraction’ (data manipulation practices). The second part concerns the Informatic Person, and the embodied, affective, and sensemaking relationships of individuals occurring across and through the Informatic Context. This framework better addresses the scale of data-mediated relationships, and places subjects firmly in the foreground of how data is understood.
[Art] My data body
In My Data Body, the magnetic resonance (MR) scanned body of the artist Marilène Oliver floats prone within a `cloud' of her textual Facebook data. Into the semi-transparent, virtual body are multiple other data corpuses downloaded from social media platforms plotted into cross sections of the body. In the horizontal plane, Mac terminal data is plotted into bone, Google data into muscle and Facebook data into fat. In the vertical plane are plotted data usage agreements. Passwords and logins flow back and forth through veins and arteries, whilst retinal images, dental scans and 3D meshes of organs and bones are suspended within the quantified and datafied body [Lupton 2016; Van Dijck 2014]. There is a continuous stream of text particles that flow through and around the data body that one can swat away or nestle into.
Projects & Organizations
Consentful Tech Project
A lot of us have heard about consent with regard to our physical bodies, like in the context of medical decisions or sexual activities. But what does consent mean when it comes to our data and our digital lives?
Consentful technologies are digital applications and spaces that are built with consent at their core, and that support the self-determination of people who use and are affected by these technologies.
The Consentful Tech Project raises awareness, develops strategies, and shares skills to help people build and use technology consentfully.
Towards an embodied approach to data — Internet Democracy Project
Taking people’s experiences as the starting point, thus, makes evident that in practice, the line between our physical and virtual bodies is increasingly becoming irrelevant - so much so, in fact, that maintaining the distinction is becoming harmful. In the digital age, bodies and data are closely intertwined. The nature and impact of data and data practices is embodied.
Data Body Futures — Futures of embodied data and bodily integrity.
DataBody Futures is home for original research, artwork and resources that explore the connection between digital intrusions and our well-being, and offer solutions to protect our digital integrity.
Writing by Dr. Anja Kovacs
When Our Bodies Become Data, Where Does That Leave Us? (2020). Essay in Deep Dives
This essay argues that the pervasive datafication of our bodies—epitomized by India's Aadhaar system—undermines "boundary management," the dynamic, contextual control over what we reveal about ourselves that is essential to dignity, self-determination, and the ability to question social norms. Because neither bodies nor data exist outside social contexts, this loss of control does not affect everyone equally but falls hardest on already-marginalized groups like trans people, sex workers, and women, whose forced transparency through biometric linkage, CCTV, facial recognition, and predictive policing deepens existing inequalities and forecloses the private spaces where critical perspective and social change can develop.
Embodied Data and AI: A Collection of Essays (2025). Edited collection
Adopting a feminist approach to data, we took as our starting point the understanding that data in contemporary life is integral to Africans’ embodied or “lived” experiences of their bodies. Taking such an approach, we hypothesised, would then shed new light on how data and its uses perpetuate injustice in the context of artificial intelligence (AI), and help us to determine what needs to be done to turn this around in Africa as elsewhere.
Searching for a Room of One’s Own in Cyberspace: Datafication and the Global Feminisation of Privacy (2022).
Book chapter in Emerging Trends in Data Governance.
The essay argues that privacy has historically been constructed in gendered ways that subordinate rather than empower women and gender and sexual minorities—curtailing their decisional autonomy and self-determination, as reflected in Indian jurisprudence—and that pervasive datafication is now extending this inferior, watered-down form of privacy to everyone, a phenomenon the author calls the "global feminisation of privacy." This generalisation is driven by three trends: the mobilisation of consent and anonymity as tools of surveillance capitalism and government, the resulting reconfiguration of public and private, and the treatment of data as inherently disembodied and deterritorialised.
Informed Consent - Said Who? A Feminist Perspective on Principles of Consent in the Age of Embodied Data (202O).
Data Governance Network Working Paper No. 13, co-authored with Tripti Jain
Drawing on feminist theory around consent—particularly sexual consent and critiques of "property in the person"—this paper argues that consent regimes in data protection are currently deployed to legitimise rather than challenge harmful data practices, and it develops a set of feminist principles pointing to three areas of needed change (in data collection, data use, and protection of the especially vulnerable) required to build a genuinely empowering rather than exploitative data infrastructure.