Beskrivelse
Presentation: Healthcare appscapes: How patient data flow from public welfare systems to private techThis paper discusses the datafication of patients across public and private app infrastructures in the welfare state of Denmark. It is based on an empirical study of self-tracking and other forms of person-based tracking across key contexts of everyday life. The project, Datafied Living, follows 80 Danes from all walks of life for one year through interviews, photo diaries, and app usage logs to understand how datafication shapes possibilities for human flourishing and what it means to live a good and meaningful datafied life. This paper focuses on a subset of the study participants – namely individuals who track their health, either as part of a structured and coerced procedure administered by health professionals or on their own on voluntary terms (or both). It casts the participants’ mobile phones as tracking devices and analyses the personal phone as a distributed system where many stakeholders, including apps and in-app third-party services, are involved in datafication processes for various purposes, including health. To approach and analyse (mobile) infrastructures for datafication, the paper analyses the appscapes (Lai & Flensburg, 2020) of the individual patient-participants. An appscape refers to 1) the participant’s full app repertoire, 2) the mobile permissions requested by the apps for them to harvest data, and 3) the third-party services embedded in each app for various purposes including analytics, advertising, optimisation, and profiling. The analyses show how a wide range of different market actors with diverse business models and incentives make up the underlying ownership structure of the individual patient-participant’s appscape as well as the apps that are particularly aimed at health tracking. The analyses illustrate new power asymmetries based on access to data and control over technological infrastructure currently characterizing the app ecosystem at large as well as pertaining to health apps in particular (Sharon, 2016). We use the appscapes to discuss 1) the implications of public-private partnerships in digital healthcare through intertwining commercial mobile tech with the digital infrastructures of the public healthcare system in Denmark and 2) how appscapes constitute a methodological resource for mapping patient dataflows as well as ownership structures in datafied patient life. References Dow-Schüll, N. (2016). Keeping track: Personal informatics, self-regulation, and the data-driven life, New York, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Lai, S. S., & Flensburg, S. (2020). A proxy for privacy: Uncovering the surveillance ecology of mobile apps. Big Data & Society, 7(2), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720942543 Mayer-Schönberger, V., & Cukier, K. (2013). Big data: A revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Sharon, T. (2016). The Googlization of health research: from disruptive innovation to disruptive ethics. Personalized Medicine, 13(6), 563–574.
| Periode | 20. okt. 2022 |
|---|---|
| Begivenhedstitel | ECREA 2022: 9th European Communication Conference |
| Begivenhedstype | Konference |
| Placering | Aarhus, DanmarkVis på kort |