Privacidade projetada, plataformas digitais e o sujeito-dado: um estudo de caso dos problemas contemporâneos de privacidade a partir dos smart speakers

Abstract

This thesis has as its object of study the contemporary problems of privacy resulting from the emergence of the platform society – especially from the phenomena of platformization, datafication and algorithmic performativity. We take as a case for analysis, specifically, the adoption and use of smart speakers. We seek, therefore, to understand how these devices affect the establishment of the private life of their users from their addition in the domestic space. To do so, we developed an investigation from a neomaterialist perspective, interested in the multiple human and non-human mediations that, together, birth the phenomenon of privacy. In the first moment of this thesis, corresponding to the first chapters, we present our empirical object and build our theoretical-conceptual bases. We begin by presenting smart speakers and how they work, as well as the strategies through which digital platforms seek to frame the idea of privacy, especially for these products. From this, we propose the idea of subject-data as an interpretative key to think about the privacy problems involved in the use of these artifacts. In a second moment, from the presentation of neomaterialism, we develop a genealogy of the relations between communication technologies and privacy, culminating in the proposal of ideal-types to think about the multiple controversies involving the media and private life. We also focus on the characterization of the platform society, as well as on the datafication regimes of surveillance capitalism and data colonialism. We seek to demonstrate how the design of digital technologies acts as an important instrument in the perpetuation of business models based on data extraction. With these bases built, we entered the field research developed for this thesis. 21 in-depth interviews were conducted and an online questionnaire was applied to users, totaling 271 responses. Based on this data collection and the previously discussed theoretical-methodological bases, we present a timeline of smart speaker adoption and the consequences of this adoption on the constitution of users' private lives. In general, we found that users tend to naturalize the presence of the smart speaker and, to some extent, adhere to the platforms' datafication regimes. As a cause, we identified that platforms seek to put into practice protective measures and design strategies that are not able to prevent the advance of surveillance capitalism, on the contrary. From this, we propose the concept of designed privacy as a way to shed light on how the notion of privacy becomes a bargaining chip instrumented from abusive design practices.