Recent forecasts indicate that the global market for “big data” analytics in the education sector will exceed $50 billion by 2030, with higher education accounting for approximately half of the revenue generated from software and services for data analytics. Higher education institutions, now essential producers and consumers of big data, are undergoing a transformative re-envisioning that emphasizes the implementation of data analytics to “streamline” higher education.
Central to this datafication of higher education is the emergence of data professionals who not only are tasked with a range of activities, such as data collection, analysis, and interpretation, but also assume responsibilities that may have a direct impact on organizational data governance. However, data professionals’ positions may come with many ethical and policy dilemmas. On the one hand, owing to their digital literacy, data professionals are positioned to foresee and advocate actions to alleviate potential problems related to data security and privacy. However, their everyday experience involves balancing their ideals about data privacy and their responsibilities to campus members with the institution’s strategic focus on data extraction and use.
Our article, (by Mihaela Popescu, Lemi Baruh, and Samuel Sudhakar) “Role-Based Privacy Cynicism and Local Privacy Activism: How Data Stewards Navigate Privacy in Higher Education” published in Big Data & Society aims to explore how data professionals navigate the complex contours of privacy in their role as institutional actors and as private individuals. For this purpose, we conducted 15 semi-structured in-depth interviews with data professionals from California State University. These interviews were part of a larger ethnographic project on data governance.
Several important insights emerged from the in-depth interviews.
- While mindful of the risks associated with the greater trend towards datafication in all aspects of our lives, data professionals are more receptive to datafication in higher education, which they see as beneficial.
- When faced with potentially problematic uses of data, data professionals attempt to bypass the constraints imposed by their institutional roles by devising short-term tactics to delay or hinder the implementation of such uses of data.
- While such short-term tactics may be useful, their use comes at the expense of creating structural changes to counter the tide of datafication and institutional apathy for privacy.
- Similar to the forms of “privacy cynicism,” “privacy apathy,” or “privacy fatigue” that consumers experience in their dealings with surveillance capitalist enterprises, our interviews with data professionals underscored how they felt a lack of efficacy in protecting privacy. This feeling of powerlessness is compounded by the disillusionment they have with the apathy of the data subjects they aim to protect.
- We contend that this form of “privacy cynicism” among data professionals has significant ramifications for the extent of privacy individuals enjoy. Specifically, we posit that such a dearth of perceived and actual efficacy may engender a spiral of resignation, a mutually reinforcing form of cynicism that may diminish data professionals’ inclination to advocate for enhanced privacy, which in turn diminishes data subjects’ access to substantial privacy options and exacerbates their privacy apathy or cyncism.
We would like to thank the editors of the special issue on Digital Resignation and Privacy Cynicism: Nora Draper, Christian Pieter Hoffmann, Christoph Lutz, Giulia Ranzini, Joe Turow
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