Human Rights for the Data Society

In the 2010s, the United Nations embarked on a series of projects to embrace and respond to digital data technologies as part of its human rights agenda. Human rights for the Data Society argues that these efforts produced a world in which the biggest technology corporations and their data technologies are widely accepted as indispensable to the international human rights project: the data society. The UN did this through a series of technical projects that produce 'datafied' forms of human rights, whereby core concepts and practices of rights are understood by reference to or performed through digital data technologies, and where the human of human rights recedes into the data. Thus, when human rights practitioners – at the UN and beyond – use datafied forms of human rights, they play a significant role in making the data society possible. By the same token, they also play a significant role in foreclosing alternative possibilities – of worlds in which human rights and digital data technologies might be imagined differently.