Slumdog romance: Facebook love and digital privacy at the margins (original) (raw)
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Through the controversial internet.org initiative, Facebook now serves as The Internet to the majority of the world’s marginalized demographic. The Politics of Data series continues with Payal Arora discussing the role of Facebook and internet regulation in the global South. While the West have had privacy laws in place since the 1970s, the emerging markets are only now seriously grappling with this. This piece explores some of the unfolding areas of vulnerability in the digital romance economy.
Fifty shades of Privacy: Facebook practices at the margins of Brazil and India
2016
Facebook serves as The Internet to majority of the world's poor through its controversial internet.org initiative. By providing free internet service to the poor in the global South, it has become the one-stop-shop for most social activity. Given the collapse of contextual diversity here, Facebook is both a forum of public expression and state control on morality and privacy rights. It is complicit in obfuscation that empowers and exploits. While universalizing virtual space for this vast populace with its global brand and algorithmic structure, specificities manifest through gender and racial enactments and codes of conduct across the global South. This text investigates how low-income youth in two of the BRICS nations-Brazil and India, exercise and express their notions on digital privacy, interpersonal surveillance and trust on Facebook. As Facebook situates itself as the dominant virtual public sphere for the world's poor, we are compelled to ask ourselves if digital inclusivity comes at the price of cultural diversity. This text provides fresh perspectives on how privacy is pluralizing for a globalizing and emergent digital public.
Monitoring Cyberspace: The Internet's Love Affair with Sex
The dynamic nature of sex work has become heightened in an era of technology and its related patterns of increased globalization. No longer does prostitution require physical solicitation or interaction. Rather, it benefits by operating in a sphere dominated by electronic financial transactions, internet personas, and virtual realities.Thus, the purpose of this paper is to understand the prominent discourses of international policing institutions and their impact on the empowerment of sex workers in the online and virtual sectors, with respectable examination on the current spaces in which prostitution is done on the internet. Specifically, the ability for sex workers to use the internet for empowering purposes in prostitution is limited by the policing of institutions whose policies lack circumstantial information, by the role played by damaging online sex addiction and child pornography, and the ambiguous and understudied use of artificial intelligence as a means to apprehending predatory individuals.
Not Revenge, Not Porn: Analysing the Exposure of Teenage Girls Online in Brazil
The term “revenge porn” has become popular internationally for describing a virtual form of violence: the act of an ex-partner making private sexual images or videos public online. Strictly speaking, so-called revenge porn could victimise anyone, but it most involves the violation of women. The impact on the lives of victims of revenge porn can be devastating: some are forced to leave school, or a place of employment, or to withdraw from social life; others face depression and even commit suicide. While this form of violence existed previously – the act of circulating private information from a previous intimate relationship in order to harm the other person is not new – information and communications technologies (ICTs) allow the impact to be felt more widely. Because many women are affected by revenge porn online, it is now at the centre of feminist advocacy. Across the world, all stakeholders – government, business and civil society – have been coming up with initiatives to discuss and propose alternatives to eradicate or minimise the effects of revenge porn. There are bills and laws that punish those who upload private images and videos,1 campaigns aimed at building awareness and offering support to victims,2 and initiatives by internet companies that aim to block this kind of content.3 It is no different in Brazil. While monitoring this problem here, however, we were faced with a peculiar situation: a case where teenagers aged 12 to 15 years and living on the outskirts of São Paulo were exposed online, in a phenomenon that became known as the “Top 10”. However, this phenomenon did not fit the strict definition of “revenge porn”.4 The analysis of this problem, combined with a more general look at what the government can do, offers insight into how to design public policies for violence against women on the internet in Brazil and, we suspect, elsewhere in the world.
Medium, 2022
In early 2022, the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity issued a call for researchers from UC Berkeley to pursue projects exploring “alternative digital futures,” focused on how the future of digital security could or should be reimagined to be more inclusive of diverse perspectives. Among the scholars selected for this program was Dr. Juliana Friend, an anthropologist working at the intersection of health equity and tech policy, who facilitated the conversation below and authored its introduction. Below is a transcribed conversation with Ndeye and Yacine, two Senegalese activists who practice sex work and want to share their perspectives on digital privacy with international audiences. (To protect their anonymity, Ndeye and Yacine are both pseudonyms.)
Negotiating intimacy and harm: female internet users in Mumbai, India
The EROTICS (Exploratory Research on Sexuality and the Internet) research project was initiated in 2008 as an exploratory step bridge the gap between policy and legislative measures that regulate content and practice on the internet, and the actual lived practices, experiences and concerns of internet users in the exercise of their sexual rights. It aims to promote evidence-based policy-making by engaging in on-the-ground research with a range of internet users – especially those most affected by internet regulation measures, including young women and people of diverse sexualities – to inform and guide policy making for a more account able process of decision making. The project was coordinated by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and conducted with local partners comprising feminist academics and activists in five countries, namely Brazil, India, Lebanon, South Africa and the United States
Policy & Internet, 2021
Why have feminists in Mexico been arguing with women's groups and against the state over the criminalization of digital violence, and what do these struggles mean for its governance? This article analyzes the social struggles surrounding passage of the Olimpia Law of 2019, which criminalizes digital violence in Mexico. Although criminalization of digital violence as a means of governing online behavior has recently attracted much attention globally, this study proposes that such measures can, at the same time, put at risk the human rights of women actively participating in the political realm (human rights defenders, activists, and journalists). I further contend that governing digital violence is not so much a regulatory question but should, rather, be understood as a field of struggle among diverse collective projects. Thus, I argue that there is a need to further reconceptualize digital violence against women in politics as a way to address the multiplicity of actors and perspectives involved in internet governance. Following textual analysis of documents from feminist organizations arguing against the criminalization of digital violence, I conclude by proposing public policies to fight this phenomenon beyond criminalization.
Trafficking Internet Brides, Information & Communications Technology Law
This article critically examines the world of international marriage agencies who operate on the Internet, selling women for profit to men to buy from one end of the world to the other. It examines the relationship between capitalism and choice with coercion and misogyny, as expressed on Internet dating sites. It highlights the role governments play in facilitating trafficking of young women and girls from economic poor areas to advanced economies, arguing that states underwrite this type of violence against women and children, profiting in the process. It concludes that there is no dignity for humanity in trafficking women and girls in order to (sexually) exploit them for profit.
Political Geography, 2006
A key aspect of globalisation, glocalisation and transnationalisation is the development of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Such technologies have major implications for sexualities and sexualised violences, and raise profound implications, contradictions and challenges for sexual citizenship. These implications include the affirmation of sexual citizenship, with the creation of new forms of sexual communities; and the denial of sexual citizenship, with the production of new opportunities for pornography, prostitution, sexual exploitation and sexual violences. The article goes on to focus particularly on the contradictory implications of ICTs for sexual citizenship. These include the simultaneous development of more democratic and diverse sexual communities, and sexual work and sexually violent work; movements beyond the exploiter/exploited dichotomy; complex relations of non-exploitative and sexual exploitation, commercialisation of sex, and enforcement of dominant sexual practices; blurring of the social, sexualesocial, sexual and sexually violent, and of the sexually 'real' and sexually 'representational'; closer association of sex with the 'visual' and the 'representational'; increasing domination of the virtual as the mode(l) for non-virtual, proximate sociality, and possible impacts of the virtual on increased non-virtual, proximate sociality, even greater possibilities for 'pure relationships'; shifts in sexual space and sexual place; development of new forms of transnational sexual citizenship, within shifting Political Geography 25 www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo transpatriarchies. Contradictions between the scale of global material sex economies and the representation and reproduction of the sexual through ICTs appear to be increasing.